Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?
Yes, on several occasions.<p>Don&#x27;t do rewrites. Morph the code towards &quot;North.&quot; Old code has a reason for existing and being correct: It&#x27;s there. From an evolutionary and survival of the fittest model, things that are out there already have a lot going for them. The ugly warts are battle scars of nasty edge cases and bugs.<p>This is one of the main reasons I strongly value the skill of reading code in engineers. It&#x27;s rare and so important.