All code dies
Memento mori for software: the system you maintain with such care will be deleted — and writing while knowing that changes how you write.
Time is a river of passing events, and strong is its current: no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by, and another takes its place.
On some server, right now, runs the most important code you have ever written. Ten years from now — maybe five, maybe at the next replanning — it will not exist. Rewritten, migrated, switched off in a "legacy cleanup" sprint by someone who will never know your name and will curse, out loud, the utils.ts you swear made sense at the time.
This is not a tragedy. It is the only promise software delivers on schedule.
The jQuery empire
There was a world in which jQuery ran on more than 70% of the web. Backbone was mandatory. CoffeeScript was the future. Each of those technologies had its craftsmen — people who mastered every detail, wrote the books, gave the talks, argued with strangers online defending the right choice. Their work was excellent, and it went away all the same, as mine will and yours will. The difference is that nobody ran a conference called "Is CoffeeScript dead?". It just died, no keynote granted.
The Romans staffed a role for this: it is said that during a triumph, a slave held the crown above the general's head and whispered memento mori — remember that you die. Not to ruin the party; to give the party its correct size.
The framework of the season deserves the same whisper. Preferably during the keynote.
Attachment is emotional tech debt
The developer who refuses to delete the module they wrote. The one who defends the old architecture because they designed it. The one who sabotages the migration quietly, one skeptical comment at a time — every team has one, and if you don't know who yours is, I have bad news. All suffer from the same mistake the Stoics spent centuries dismantling: confusing what we make with what we are.
Healthy ownership belongs to Epictetus' first list: care, attention, responsibility for what is under your keyboard today. Attachment belongs to the second: the demand that the world preserve what you made. The first improves the system. The second only guarantees that the inevitable deletion hurts more — and that the team remembers you as the migration's difficult chapter, not as the code's author.
What remains
If all code dies, what are you actually building?
The Stoic answer: you. The judgment sharpened by every review, the taste that formed, the calm you learned to keep in production — that migrates from system to system, stack to stack, and no cleanup sprint reaches it. It is the only artifact of your work with no deprecation date.
Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations for himself, with no publication plan, in a military camp on the banks of the Danube. The empire he administered — the most critical production system in the world, with the worst observability in history — went down. The private notes on how to keep one's head have been in production for eighteen centuries, without a single incident.
It holds for your work too: the code is the artifact. You are the project.