There is a codebase out there with a simple "send an email" operation that goes through seven layers of abstraction. An EmailService that uses an EmailProvider that wraps an EmailClient that calls an EmailAdapter that uses a MessageSender that invokes a TransportLayer that finally, after all of that, calls the actual email API. Every layer has a reason. Logging here. Error handling there. Retries somewhere in the middle. It is, by almost every definition the industry has agreed on, clean code. It is also code that nobody on the team can fully understand anymore. That is the problem nobody talks about when they are quoting Uncle Bob at you in a code review. How Clean Code Stopped Being a Tool and Became a Standard Robert Martin's book came out in 2008. It gave developers a vocabulary and a set of rules. Short functions. Meaningful names. Single responsibility. No comments because the code should speak for itself. Good ideas. Genuinely. The problem is what happened next.…