When writing bad code, playing smarter sometimes gives the worst results.

Tangled Confusion

The developer writes code all over the place; the changes conflict or cancel each other and leave the situation as broken as before.

Elegant Conceit

The developer solves everything with a single crummy function. For example, it builds a list of items from scratch every time instead of loading it from a database.

Correcting this mistake takes a lot more work, because the right logic is entirely absent, but a lot of code depends on that single bad function. It’s a case of the wrong abstraction. Is this laziness or perverse genius?