The No Rewrite Rule

There's a rule enforced in every codebase at Meridian: no broad rewrites without the explicit words "rewrite" or "rebuild from scratch" in the instruction.

The reason is simple. A wholesale rewrite discards everything in the file. Most of what it discards was put there deliberately, by someone who understood the system at a specific moment in time. You may not remember why it's there. You may never have known. But it was decided, and the decision is now embedded silently in the structure of the code.

Strip it away without reading it first and you've erased institutional memory you didn't know you had.

The alternative is surgical. Find the specific element that needs to change. Change only that. Verify. Commit. Move on. Slower in the moment, dramatically faster in aggregate, because you don't spend hours recovering the context you just destroyed.

I wrote a piece a while back about corporate folklore — the organizational version of this problem. Processes nobody designed on purpose. Approval chains whose original logic evaporated years ago. I used Taylor Swift's folklore as the frame: she stripped away every inherited rule about what her music was supposed to sound like, dropped the weight of prior success and label mythology, and made the best record of her career.

Strip away the weight. Build without constraint.

But there's a tension in that framing worth naming directly.

Swift wasn't destroying documented process. She was discarding mythology. Unwritten rules. The accumulated assumptions of an industry, passed from person to person until the original reasoning was untraceable. Nobody wrote down "a Taylor Swift album must do X." It was just understood. It was just folklore.

The No Rewrite Rule isn't a contradiction of that. It's the mechanism that prevents more folklore from forming.

When a decision is documented — when someone wrote down what they changed and why, when the reasoning lives in a commit message or a spec or a Notion page — that decision becomes process. You can interrogate it. You can choose to keep it or discard it with full information. You know what you're replacing.

Undocumented decisions become folklore by default. They get retold without context until nobody knows why they exist. Someone comes along and strips them away, and sometimes they're right to do it, and sometimes they've just erased the thing holding everything together.

The practical rule: before rewriting anything, read it. Understand what's there. If you find something you can't explain, document it before you touch it. If it's folklore, name it as such and discard it consciously. If it's process, update it deliberately.

Institutional memory is only valuable when it's documented. Undocumented, it's just weight. Documentation is what converts it from one to the other.

Taylor's industry never wrote anything down. It just told stories. That's why she could drop it cleanly.

Build the documentation as you go and you'll never have to choose between honoring the past and building freely. You'll have enough context to do both.