Can't every task or bugfix not be a goddamned Chesterton's Fence exercise...

Seriously I feel like I'm spending more time divining what the ancestors might've thought of when they wrote their code.

A byproduct of lazy commit messages.

Thanks for teaching me that term - hadn’t heard it before

For anyone else wondering: ”Chesterton’s Fence is a simple rule of thumb that suggests you should never destroy a fence, change a rule, or alter a tradition if you do not understand why it was created in the first place.”

I totally recognise myself

Even with descriptive commitMessages it’s hard to know what was written thoughtfully and what was a quick hack

I find it’s a huge benefit to working in projects where a team has written down a lot of code discussions as PR comments (or even just code talk in Slack). found two complex functions in a legacy codebase and was able to find old comments about the first saying ”this was a hack - I hope someone rewrites it in the future”. But the other was ”this seems unnecessarily complex at first, Bob tried to rewrite it last year - but found it is actually necessary. And simpler than most other solutions like X and Y”