Every Rails app starts with a solid foundation, but as features evolve and teams change, even the best projects can drift toward complexity. Over time, code that once felt effortless can become tangled, slow, and hard to maintain. This talk dives deep into what truly degrades a Rails application over time. We’ll explore practical ways to diagnose the health of a codebase, including underutilized metrics beyond test coverage and churn. Along the way, I’ll share battle-tested strategies for bringing struggling Rails apps back to life without a painful rewrite.