Think about freshness. When code was recently written, it's fresh in memory. People can remember what the code was written for, and why it was written. As time

Think about freshness. When code was recently written, it's fresh in memory. People can remember what the code was written for, and why it was written. As time passes, code gets stale. And finally, when people can't remember what the code does, at that point you could consider it rotten. At some point the tooling becomes unavailable and you wont be able to run it! Ways to prevent code rot: * Clean (refactor, remove tech debt and legacy code) often. * Write good comments. * Keep tooling & dependencies up to date.