Every engineer has fantasized about it: starting over. Throwing out the old system and building something clean. No legacy constraints. No accumulated compromises. Just pure, intentional design.
It never works that way.
You can delete all the code. You can architect from scratch. You can make the best technical decisions possible. But you can't delete the organizational memory. You can't unlearn what the last system taught you. You can't escape the patterns that already run through the business, the workflows people have shaped themselves around, the problems you've already paid the cost of understanding.
The new system will look clean. But it will be haunted.
What rewrites actually inherit
