No one sets out to build a messy codebase. Every project starts clean. Clear structure Good intentions Reasonable patterns And then, over time, things change. The codebase grows. And something starts to happen. What “Code Rot” Actually Looks Like Code rot isn’t sudden. It’s gradual. You start seeing things like: Duplicate logic in different places Slightly different ways of doing the same thing Functions that are hard to trace Features that break unrelated parts of the system Nothing looks completely broken. But nothing feels clean anymore either. How It Happens Codebases don’t rot because developers are careless. They rot because systems aren’t enforced. 1. Patterns Aren’t Defined At the beginning, patterns are informal. “We usually do it this way” “Follow the existing examples” But without enforcement, those patterns drift. 2. Every Feature Is a New Decision Without structure: Each developer makes decisions independently Similar problems get different solutions The system slowly loses consistency 3.…