Code Griot
Noun · Slang & Abbreviations
Definitions
A storyteller or long-time team member who preserves the oral history of a codebase, including why strange decisions were made. In engineering slang, the code griot is invaluable when the commit history is technically present but emotionally unreadable.
In plain English: A person who carries and shares the living history of a codebase.
Example: "They finally understood the weird retry rules after talking to the code griot who remembered the outage that had shaped the original design."