Every complex IT system eventually becomes a kind of institutional memory — not just code, but crystallized decisions made by people who have since left the room. The 11th-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides, in his 'Guide for the Perplexed', argued that accumulated tradition can so thoroughly embed its original premises that practitioners lose the ability to distinguish the premise from the fact. Financial IT architectures do exactly this: the reason a field is named 'CUST_TYP_2' or a risk calculation runs through a particular module is often a regulatory interpretation someone made in 1998 — now indistinguishable from bedrock reality. Maimonides' prescription was ruthless: periodically return to first causes, asking not 'how does this work?' but 'what problem was this built to solve, and does that problem still exist?' The practical move isn't a system audit — it's identifying one workflow or data structure you've stopped questioning and asking a genuinely naive question about its original purpose.

What did you last treat as a technical constraint that might actually be an inherited opinion?

Drawing from Jewish Philosophy / Medieval Rationalism — Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon, Guide for the Perplexed / Moreh Nevukhim, c. 1190, on the recovery of first causes buried beneath accumulated tradition)