In the days of Scrum and agile the focus is on quickly bringing product to market.
In software 80% of what to we is called maintenance – the act of repair. Such care and ongoing refinement never come to an end.
I read doing major softer chunks from scratch every seven years or so
Name a variable using the same care with which you name the first born child
Be honest to the code, to your colleagues about the state of your code and be with yourself about your code.
Learning to write clean code is hard work.
Code will never end because code represents the details of the requirements and specifying requirements in such details a machine can execute is called programming. There always will be code.