> But make sure you give your developers enough time to sit down with the code and understand it > It means that all future developers will have to spend a lot

> But make sure you give your developers enough time to sit down with the code and understand it > It means that all future developers will have to spend a lot of time to understand complex code that could be simpler. How did you get from one to the other? The OP's point is to give people enough time to figure things out. Not to never rewrite. We need to agree that going to either extreme, always rewrite vs never rewrite, is not a good solution, or even a solution. We should spend some energy in figuring out why to rewrite (is this code even used? is it used more than foo / time unit, is this code causing any problems as is, is it worth the time to rewrite it) and how to rewrite (make sure the new version covers all the use cases etc). In short, we should have a way to decide what to do if you say to rewrite and I say no.