Each and every line of code you write is a liability. Even more so when you wrote it for someone else. You must always be able to rebuild it from source, at least as long as your client expect the software to work. If you feel it’s not worth it, you probably low-balled the contract. If you don’t want to maintain code, have the client pay a yearly maintenance fee, give the code and the responsibility to maintain it to your client at the end of development, or add a time limit to it’s support.

There’s no “maintenance mode” software: either it’s in use and must be kept updated with regard to it’s execution environment, or it’s not used anymore and can be erased and forgotten. Doing differently opens too much security issues, which shouldn’t be acceptable for us all as a trade.

Modular’s Mojo might interest you - it just popped up in my news feed, it’s entirely a coincidence.

Others has answered the specific cases where TTM is paramount.

When time is less of an issue, in my experience it’s in no particular order a mix of:

• product owners or similar role wanting “everything and right now” for no reason whatsoever, except maybe some bonus;
• bosses bossing around to try and justify their existence instead of easying progress ;
• developers being not much more than code jockeys with a tendancy to develop by StackOverflow copy/paste;
• operations lacking time, resources or knowledge to build a proper CI/CD pipeline - when it’s not an issue of operations by ServerFault copy/paste;
• experts (DBA, virtualization, middlewares) being kept out of the project, and only asked for advice when things go terribly wrong later.

All in all, instead of short term profit, it’s a lack of not-so-long term vision and engagement from everyone involved. They just don’t care.

Yeah, I’m the one in charge of fixing the mess, why you ask?

Your question is a bit vague but it looks to me that what you want is some sort of expert system of inference engine.

There might be some open source solutions, and there’s always the GNU Prolog language that might suit your needs.

I suspect that you won’t get a graphviz structure out of it though.

We went from a computational tool serving a wide range of tasks to an entertainment widget barely more interactive than a TV were work is an afterthought.

The former was expected to not get in the way of their users, the latter is designed to retain attention as long as possible to maximize consumption