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The flip side of that is that refactoring can be a surprisingly effective tool for understanding.

• hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago
  Sometimes by breaking prod. You learn what you didn't understand very quickly then.
  • sorokod 5y ago
    A non prod breaking scenario I have seen - only towards the end of a fairly long refactoring exercise, when tests for certain edge cases start failing, you finally understand the full purpose of the code you are refactoring.
    • hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago
      Not to fall into the obvious trope too much, but: Your legacy code has tests for edge cases? I'm happy when it has any tests. More often, it's untested and I write the tests myself before refactoring the implementation.