Rails apps rarely collapse all at once. What starts as a TODO comment quietly becomes code you're afraid to touch: hard to understand, harder to change, and worse with every workaround. You might be eyeing a rewrite but, do you actually know how it got there?

After 13 years consulting on Rails apps, I've seen the same patterns of rot show up again and again. This talk is about those patterns: how they start, why they compound, and what you can actually do about them before they become someone else's problem (or yours, six months from now).