Code Pollution

Definitions

1. The accumulation of low-quality patterns, unnecessary duplication, noisy abstractions, or leaked concerns that degrade the health of a codebase. In engineering slang, code pollution is what happens when small compromises pile up faster than cleanup can remove them.

   In plain English: The buildup of messy or low-quality code that degrades a codebase.

   Example: "Generated helpers started causing code pollution once teams modified local copies instead of fixing the generator and cleaning the root cause."

Related Terms

• Code Basement
• Code Confetti
• Code Frankenstein
• Code Jungle
• Code Swamp
• Cruft
• Data Dungeon
• Data Swamp
• Franken-Code