Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business

anatoliybabushka.com · 3 months ago · 57

An engineer describes how most code rewrites serve the developer's preferences rather than business needs, cautioning that production code contains accumulated bug fixes and design reasons that are easily lost. The strongest justification for a rewrite is a concrete business problem—an end-of-life runtime, a person leaving, a measurable performance tax, or new capability requirements—not aesthetic preferences or unfamiliarity with the existing framework. AI coding agents make generating replacement code fast but don't solve the harder problem of rediscovering why the original code was written that way, risking the introduction of old bugs and creating a cycle of unnecessary rewrites.