Software Engineering Jan 23 2026 • 4 min read

If It Ain’t Broke, Refactor Anyway: Trust, Abstraction, and the Wild Loops of Modern Software

Emerging from the software engineering blogosphere this week is a common theme: our tools, abstractions, and even our AI assistants are growing in sophistication, yet true progress demands deliberate choice, not just more automation. From rethinking software supply chain security, to reinventing the age-old friction of Java checked exceptions, to leveraging the latest in AI-assisted workflows and animation libraries—it's clear that the discipline is in a state of energetic, sometimes chaotic, evolution. Let’s unpack what’s happening (and why it matters).

The Old Is New Again: Making Peace with Legacy in Modern Java

The post from HackerNoon takes us on a journey through the peculiar world of Java’s checked exceptions—once celebrated, now a perennial thorn, especially when slammed into the sleek lines of lambda expressions. The scent of legacy code wafts heavily: three different patterns emerge to coax exception-throwing methods into the modern, lambda-friendly world. We see roll-your-own wrappers, tried-and-tested third-party libraries (Commons Lang 3 and Vavr), and, for the truly audacious, compiler plugins like Manifold that simply tell the Java compiler to chill out and move on.

What’s the insight? While clever code scaffolding and community libraries can address many pain points, truly deep interoperability often requires poking at the compiler or reevaluating the language itself—perhaps even switching to something like Kotlin. In other words, frameworks and tools are nice, but your core platform’s philosophy matters. Technical debt is sometimes best tackled by questioning first principles, not just patching old habits.

Package Management, Containers & Trust: Can We Fix the Plumbing?

Next, two posts channel a shared anxiety over supply chain trust at an unprecedented scale. The New Stack argues that locking down container images post-facto (hardening) is a band-aid, not a cure. The real fix? Build—and prove provenance—from source, inside an automatable, trustworthy pipeline. This echoes in the Software Engineering Daily interview, where package managers like Vlt are highlighted as existentially important in JavaScript’s sprawling ecosystem: bottlenecks, security holes, and systemic technical debt abound.

It’s tempting to think adding scanners and security policies will fix things, but the truth remains: unless we can establish, audit, and maintain trustworthy origins all the way up our stacks, our applications sit on shifting sand. Incremental security matters, but rebuilding the process (not just the product) is now non-negotiable for sustainable software.

AI Development: More Than Just Automated Guesswork

AI is everywhere—but the hype and hope are tempered by pragmatism. Martin Fowler and Thoughtworks colleagues illuminate how LLMs are far from silver bullets. Programming, they remind us, is the iterative mapping of “what” (intent/domain) to “how” (mechanism/implementation)—a constant feedback loop. AI tools can sketch, suggest, and prototype, but only humans can develop the stable abstractions that survive change. LLMs lack the subtlety required to evolve abstractions over time; they remix what exists and generate plausible code, but the role of the developer as architect and refiner remains essential (at least for now).

The InfoQ article series hammers this home: AI in production is no longer about model performance alone, but about architecture, clear guardrails, and a relentless focus on reliability. The systems around AI matter as much as the model itself. Observability, testing, and iterative validation are the new must-haves. New Relic demonstrates this by introducing monitoring hooks for ChatGPT apps, exposing user interactions and AI-triggered failures otherwise hidden behind iframe walls.

Animation, Experience & Community: The Right Tool for the Job

Meanwhile, over on the UI front, LogRocket’s review of React animation libraries is a crash course on purposeful tooling. The space is crowded—Motion, React Spring, GreenSock, Anime.js, and now pure CSS solutions amplified by Tailwind—but the verdict is nuanced: choose for your stack, your constraints, and your desired tradeoffs. Sometimes pure CSS suffices, sometimes you need pro-grade fine control. Performance, bundle size, and community health all matter more than hype.

The through-line? Don’t default to heavyweight tools. Maturity and maintainability should trump fashion, and “best” is context-dependent. Even in supposedly solved spaces like UI animation, careful benchmarking is the name of the game.

AI IDEs: Workflows, Not Just Code

The Atlassian blog’s hands-on with Google Antigravity—a VS Code fork designed for AI agent-powered engineering—provides a telling case study. Antigravity shines when it has clear, continuously-updated requirements (via AppRequirements.md), and demonstrates new workflow primitives for onboarding agents, defining rules, and refining skills. But for all its AI muscle, success still comes from incremental, guided human intervention. Building robust software still depends on writing, reviewing, and iterating—just now with a bit more help from the machines. The idea is not replacing developers but turning specification and architecture craft into a more central, iterable process.

Conclusion: Is More Automation the Goal?

If one hopes for a tidy software utopia, these posts offer a reality check. Language quirks live on and demand thoughtful workarounds. Supply chain trust is an architectural, not just technological, concern. AI can accelerate experiments and code generation, but engineering remains a human discipline of intent, abstraction, and deliberate evolution. Even the tools we use—whether for securing our build pipelines, writing lambdas, or animating React components—benefit when we choose them carefully and adapt them thoughtfully to our needs.

Progress in software is not just about faster loops—it’s about smarter ones, founded on trust, intent, and iterative learning. And so, as the cycle spins on, the future of engineering remains—thankfully—surprisingly human.