The rewrite always feels righteous. You're staring at fifteen years of decisions made by people long gone, solving problems that no longer exist. "What if we just started over?" But that gnarly code isn't just mess: it's accumulated wisdom. Every weird conditional represents a real person who broke a simpler assumption. Before you delete, ask: is this cruft, or is it load-bearing?
#softwarearchitecture #technicaldebt #engineeringmanagement
