If your fencing was done by idiots, then at some point you have no alternative but to start tearing down fences and see what happens. Chesterton's Fence implies either a degree of design or a timeworn quality that most software products don't match.

Chesterton himself was using it as a religious metaphor, and I think most of us agree that software engineers are not literal gods.

It’s not that you can’t tear down the fences. It’s that you studied why they were there in the first place.

Sometimes the reason a fence exists is because the person who put it there was some combination of a) an idiot, b) extremely confused, or c) not qualified to construct fences.

Also, in software, you may find the fence sometimes exists in higher dimensions than the usual three, can turn invisible for part of its length, and occasionally exists but is four inches tall and blocks only mice. And it may also be designed, at least in part, by a blind idiot god called ChatGPT on whose altar consciousness itself is sacrificed. At this point it's worth considering whether keeping the fence around is worse than letting the bull out.

Market-based hypothesis is that the person erecting the fence incurs costs and if the expected value of the fence isn't higher than the cost of erecting it, it wouldn't have been erected in the first place.

Of course mismanagement happens but the implied value of understanding why the fence was erected is to understand the expected value it would bring and understand the problem it was trying to solve. This does not imply that it should have been erected, just that there were others before you trying to solve a problem and if they're failing it's important to know why so you don't fail in the same way.

It's funny. I had a similar analogy with some legacy systems recently. No one seemed to own or know where the data egressed to or whether it was even used anymore.

But it was also low-value data and even in the worst case we surmised the most we'd do is anger someone in marketing briefly.

I think so long as you can ascertain that the stakes are low, this is a good tactic.