Architecture & practice·Risk, blast radius and change
you deleted the odd-looking retry, and a week later found out which flaky vendor it was for.
Chesterton's fence
Do not remove something until you know why it was put there. It is not an argument for keeping everything — it is an argument that 'I cannot see why this exists' is a statement about your knowledge rather than about the thing. In practice it costs ten minutes of git blame, and the cases where those ten minutes save an incident are exactly the cases nobody could have predicted.