Gardening (Code)
Noun · Hacker Culture
Definitions
A metaphor for the steady ongoing care a codebase needs, such as pruning dead code, improving naming, adjusting boundaries, and keeping things healthy over time. In engineering culture gardening contrasts with dramatic rewrite fantasies by emphasizing maintenance as normal craft.
In plain English: The ongoing maintenance and tending needed to keep code healthy over time.
Example: "The team reserved time for gardening code because they had learned that neglected little messes eventually turned into architectural emergencies."