I can't upvote you enough. Around here, on HN, Chesterton's fences pops up so many times as some type of ageless nugget of wisdom. But another way to look at

I can't upvote you enough. Around here, on HN, Chesterton's fences pops up so many times as some type of ageless nugget of wisdom. But another way to look at it is that it's just the lazy guy's excuse to allow bit rot. Because, let's be honest, we only care about Chesterton's fence in the context of software development. Who among us did not work with software with dark corners, with files with no commits in the last 10 years, with playbooks that people just go through mechanically, because there's no one from the "old guard" who remembers why things are the way they are? Who would not love to live in an alternate reality, where each Chesterton's fence was removed at the first opportunity, rather than left there to burden future generations of unlucky toilers? Where code is clean, documentation is up to date, tests complete, colleagues who know what's going on? Well, that alternate reality does not exist, of course. But at least let's stop thinking we are wise whenever we postpone deprecating something we don't understand, just because some semi-famous essayist came up with a nice figure of speech one hundred years ago.