What You Throw Away Isn't Code. It's Twenty Years of Knowledge.
The strangler fig doesn't cut the tree down. A bird drops its seed in the canopy, the roots climb down the trunk and wrap the host, and once the host rots away, the fig stands where it stood, grown into the host's exact shape. In 2026, with AI compressing a rewrite into 11 days, that metaphor matters more, not less: the old code isn't the tree you fell. It's the tree the new code takes its shape from.