Yes exactly. It’s reverse engineering. That doesn’t mean it will be easy, but once the reverse engineering is done you are back to where you were. Anecdote: Wo

Yes exactly. It’s reverse engineering. That doesn’t mean it will be easy, but once the reverse engineering is done you are back to where you were. Anecdote: Worked for a company that had a large software component (graphical design tool) that had been written in C with a very complicated object model/macro layer, file system format etc. Zero documentation, hadn’t been updated in a decade and not a single person remained who understood it or had done more than simple bug fixes. Couldn’t rewrite as customers had huge investments in assets built from the tool. One principal dev and maybe 1-2 months? And we had the theory of mind back, explained to everyone else and a new team of 5-6 devs working productively. Component was brought into the 21st century, and this time some documentation was written.