The Exact Moment My Codebase Was Too Big

• 121 files
• ~19k lines of code
• ~23k total lines

And that’s when things started getting weird.

Links would fire, the URL would delete itself, come back, change routes again, and the UI would jump around like it was haunted.

So naturally, I assumed:
the app is just too big now.

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The Bug That Wasn’t Actually a Bug

I’d just added URL-controlled state for pages, tabs, and views.

That part worked fine.

What didn’t work was adding links after that. The app got into a loop, and every attempt to “fix” it with more generated code just repeated the same solution.

When I finally stopped and looked at the code, the issue was obvious:

• I used to manage tabs with app-wide context
• I switched to managing them via the URL
• both systems were now alive
• useEffects were reacting to each other

Two sources of truth. One loop.

I removed the old context, reordered a couple of effects, and it was fixed in minutes.

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The Actual Problem: Scope Changed

The app didn’t break because it was big.

It broke because I changed the scope.

I didn’t just refactor — I changed the mental model of how state worked. And once a codebase reaches a certain size, those changes are where complexity explodes.

Old assumptions stick around.
Generated code mixes paradigms.
Small ordering issues suddenly matter.

That’s where “mysterious” bugs come from.

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This Is Why Devs Are Never “Done”

This is also why developers won’t be replaced.

Not because writing code is hard — but because requirements and scope never stop changing.

The hard part isn’t implementing features.
It’s noticing when the model shifted and cleaning up what no longer makes sense.

Tools are great at extending a system.
They’re bad at knowing when the system itself changed.

That part is still on us.

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The Takeaway

Size matters — but scope changes matter more.

Catch them early and things stay sane.
Miss them and you get loops, slop, and “weird” behavior.

Stop generating sooner.
Read your code.
Delete old ideas.

If you want to manage dense codebases better when using code-gen tools — follow the guidelines laid out in
Stop the Slop – An Internal Guide for Devs