Code Legacy
Noun · Hacker Culture
Definitions
The inheritance a team receives from earlier code decisions, whether in the form of stable foundations, technical debt, or institutional memory encoded in software. The phrase is useful when thinking about long-lived systems as something passed down rather than freshly designed.
In plain English: The inherited history and consequences of earlier code decisions.
Example: "Their biggest challenge was not new feature demand but the code legacy of a decade-old platform that nobody had ever fully rewritten or retired."