We all know the saying “respect your elders”. Most of us grow up with the idea that experience matters, and I believe that to be true. We listen to people who have been around longer than us, we value the lessons they have learned, and we accept that their decisions were shaped by a different time and different constraints.
That attitude tends to disappear when the subject is software.
Taking over an older codebase is a familiar experience for most engineers. You open a project that has been around for years, start reading through the code, and quickly form an opinion. The structure feels outdated, patterns look odd, and choices stand out that you would never make today. The quiet conclusion often follows: this is a mess.
I have had that reaction myself more times than I care to admit. Part of that reaction comes from confidence. We see the code through the lens of what we know now, with better tools, more experience, and the benefit of hindsight. That makes it easy to assume we would have done better, given the same situation.
I remember opening a project like that more than a dozen times. A few minutes in, I was already mentally rewriting large parts of it. At the time, it felt obvious that starting fresh would be easier than understanding what was there.
What we tend to forget is that code is only the visible part of the story. It captures decisions, but not the context in which those decisions were made. Deadlines, team size, available tools, business pressure, and technical limitations rarely survive in the repository. All that remains is the outcome.
When we judge old code without understanding its context, we are judging with incomplete information.
One reason context disappears so easily is that we are rarely intentional about preserving it. Code tends to outlive conversations, whiteboards, and Slack threads. Sadly, even pull request descriptions rarely include the decisions that were made.
This is where things like Architecture Decision Records can help. Not because they enforce structure, but because they capture intent. A short note explaining why a decision was made, what alternatives were considered, and which constraints mattered at the time can make a huge difference years later.
The same is true beyond architecture. Many technical decisions are driven by product choices, timelines, or business realities. When that context is missing, the code can look arbitrary or careless, even when it was neither.
Writing these things down is not about justifying the past. It is about giving future readers a chance to understand it.
It is also worth turning that lens inward. The code I write today feels reasonable and well structured to me now. Given enough time, it will not. Someone else will open it years from now, without the benefit of my assumptions or constraints, and wonder why certain choices were made. In that sense, none of us write timeless code.
Experience in people earns respect because we understand that learning happens over time. We accept that earlier decisions were made with less information, different priorities, or under pressure. Code deserves the same generosity. It is not a monument to perfection, but a snapshot of understanding at a particular moment.
The urge to rewrite is understandable. Rewriting feels productive, clean, and decisive. Understanding takes longer, and it rarely comes with the same sense of progress. But skipping that step often means repeating mistakes rather than learning from them.
Respecting old code does not mean defending every decision or avoiding change. It means starting from the assumption that the people who worked on it were solving real problems as best they could. It means reading before rewriting, asking why something exists before removing it, and assuming rational intent instead of incompetence.
Most of the time, the code is not the problem. Missing context is.
When we approach older code with curiosity rather than judgment, we give ourselves a better chance to improve it responsibly. More importantly, we acknowledge that we are part of a longer story, not the first chapter and certainly not the last.
Respect, in software as in life, is not about agreement. It is about understanding what came before.
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