How to restrain one's self from the overwhelming urge to rewrite everything?

Question

Setup

Have you ever had the experience of going into a piece of code to make a seemingly simple change and then realizing that you\'ve just stepped into a wasteland tha

Answer 1

I've found that spending two months fixing bugs caused by my "harmless" re-write was enough to cure me of the urge to do these sorts of things without a clear mandate/project plan to do so.