How to restrain one's self from the overwhelming urge to rewrite everything?

Question

Setup

Have you ever had the experience of going into a piece of code to make a seemingly simple change and then realizing that you\'ve just stepped into a wasteland tha

Answer 1

How to restrain one’s self from the overwhelming urge to rewrite everything?

Become old*

As this has happened to me, I've gradually lost the urge to rewrite everything. Why?

• Once you've done it a few times, you realise that you often end up worse off than you started.
• Even if you're god's gift to programming and your brilliant rewrite introduces no new bugs, you'll simply fail to notice or implement about 30% of the small edge-case features/bugs which things rely on. This will cost you months in fixing
• Nothing wears down your irrational exuberance like time. Often this is a sad loss, but in this case, it's a win.

*(more experience may also be a suitable substitute if you lack the free time to become old)