> It’s because writing something new is cognitively less demanding than starting from scratch For me it's quite the opposite: starting from scratch is hard - y

> It’s because writing something new is cognitively less demanding than starting from scratch For me it's quite the opposite: starting from scratch is hard - you have to make too many decisions. On other hand when I see an average legacy code, with the rare exceptions I find an unpleasant mess - it is rare to find that whoever wrote cared about code readability and left useful comments (and I cannot blame them - in commercial projects code quality, maintainability e. t. c. often has the lowest priority and adding new features - the highest). So maintaining legacy code looks like an easier task for me, but usually more boring.