You read the code of someone who left three years ago.
It shows more than their CV. Where they rushed. What they were afraid of. What they considered so obvious it needed no explanation. A comment saying not to touch this because it breaks is a whole paragraph about a person and the state they were in that Thursday.
What is left of us is not what we meant to leave. Not the talk, not the wording in the README, not the neatly kept repository we treated as a business card.
What is left are habits built into other people's work. A way of naming variables the team picked up. A question that now gets asked at review, with nobody remembering who started asking it. A rule written into a chat once and never discussed since.
Two things about this are uncomfortable. It cannot be managed: you do not get to choose what remains of you, and attempts to choose usually leave nothing at all. And it is anonymous — a year later nobody remembers whose question it was.
It is also the only thing that outlives the project. The repository gets archived, the service gets switched off, the documentation gets rewritten for a new framework.
The habit stays in the people, for as long as they are working. After that, in the ones who came after them.