I think your advice is good as usual but without evidence to the contrary I suspect "very tight" means "written by a self-absorbed bastard with a background in C and shell scripting who thinks 2 letters is a bit on the long side for variable names, field-specific formulas and algorithms do not need comments because everyone else should at least have a Masters in the same discipline, multiple shell operations are better than CPAN modules and ought to be inlined with Perl in a style from 1997, and no operation should ever, under any condition, be tested for failure, success, or security because what would be the point, right?"

...quoth the hacker who has inherited too many code-bases written by PhDs.