Ask HN: Have you ever seen a perfect codebase?
In my experience even the best software projects have a few skeletons in their closet, blemishes on an otherwise well-built project.
At the end of the day, we all have to build things that simply work and provide business value. Striving for perfect code is not the goal. But it does make me wonder: does perfect software even exist? If not, what's the gold standard?
I've never seen a perfect anything.
The gold standard for a codebase isn’t perfection - it’s impact. Financially, the closest analogy is ROI minus Operating Costs: as long as that number is positive, you’re technically in good shape. But the real goal is to maximize that difference. For internal systems, that means pairing high ROI with high Business Impact Value.
The hidden danger? ‘Skeletons in the closet’ - technical debt, brittle architecture, poor documentation - inflate Operating Costs over time. They erode ROI silently, turning what looked like a strong investment into a liability. A truly great codebase isn’t just functional; it’s engineered to minimize those skeletons.
I don't think its possible to define what a perfect codebase would look like let alone write one. Programming is enough of an art form that quantitative analysis will always fall short. This also happens to be one of the reasons I love to write software.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check
I personally like uv
I don’t think it exists. An empty folder perhaps. Guaranteed bug free.
Provided your set of functional requirements is the empty set. If there are any requirements then an empty folder is going to have some serious functional defects.