> Yeah, that's what happens to someone's code when they moves on—becomes someone else's sandbox and they are free to knock down the castle, build another—Chesterton's Fence not withstanding, ha ha.

As someone who references Chesterton’s fence often, I not only agree the code often gets rewritten when someone moves on, I even think it’s often the right thing to do - for medium to small projects where there is one or only a few people who own the code. The reason is because I’ve seen what happens when you don’t rewrite it - the new owner(s) don’t have intimate knowledge of the codebase, and as a result, they work at the speed of molasses regardless of their skill. I have left code behind to people who are better coders than me, and it took years for them to become productive.

To be fair, I have also seen large projects with many people get rewritten and have Chesterton bite back hard, having the projects go late, cost enormous sums of money, and end up as bad as the first time, so rewrites certainly aren’t always called for.

This is all changing dramatically with Claude, BTW, people can now get into a codebase and be productive without rewriting it. They might not understand it, but this is a positive development of some kind at some level.