I deleted my source code and regenerated it in a different language

Every team eventually says the same sentence about its own system: nobody knows why it does that any more. The code is still there. It compiles, it ships, it serves traffic at three in the morning. What has gone is the knowledge that produced it. The rule someone agreed with a customer four years ago. The constraint that forced an architecture decision. The reason a strange workaround exists in the payment path. That knowledge lived in people, and it left when they did. What remains is a…