Every developer has felt it: that “ugh” moment when reading someone else’s legacy code. The variable names make no sense, abstractions are leaky, patterns inconsistent. It feels careless.
But most legacy code wasn’t written by careless people. It was written by smart developers solving the problems they had, with the context they knew, using the practices that were standard — back then.
Over time, needs change. Teams grow, shrink, pivot. Standards evolve. Layers accumulate. What was once clean, elegant, and “future-proof” slowly drifts out of alignment with the present.
So don’t get too proud of your pristine architecture today. Every “legacy mess” started as someone’s best work. Yours will too.