The archive
Issue #010
Codebase Horror Stories 8 min read· 12 Aug 2026

The Ghost Team

An Australian client. An abandoned site. An 'AWS Certified Professional' who never wrote a line of code. A revolving door of unpaid interns. And a codebase that looked like it was hammered by a hundred coders who didn't know what they were doing.

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CTO takeaway

The lesson, minus the scar tissue.

  • Certifications don't mean competence. Always check the work, not the credentials.
  • If a team can't explain their Git workflow, they don't have one. Run.
  • Unpaid interns don't build products. They build technical debt. Pay people.
  • Sometimes the best solution isn't a big team. It's one person with a clear vision and a backbone.
  • A client who's been burned needs honesty, not sales. The truth is the best service you can offer.
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