Practice · 2023–now · AI Present
AI will rewrite the codebase
Big-bang rewrite, now with a chatbot. Same failure mode; prettier slides.
AI rewrites fail for the same reasons manual ones do: unknown edge cases, missing tests, and political ownership of legacy modules. LLMs accelerate typing, not accountability. Strangler migrations still win; autopilot slides still lie.
Cost of the fad
Exec decks promised autonomous migrations "by next quarter." Teams that skipped tests, ownership, and incremental strangler patterns bought expensive demos and fragile diffs.
Case studies
Patterns
Context
The stack gets a co-pilot
AI pair programming is already changing how code is written. Agent frameworks and vector stores are still sorting winners from demos. The durable layer will look familiar: evals, retrieval quality, product UX, and ownership. Autopilot rewrites without tests are just big-bang migrations with better slides.
Compare with
Related
Practice · 1995–now
Big-bang rewrite
Replace the working system instead of strangling it. A perennial money pit with new branding each decade.
$ "We'll freeze features and rewrite in the hot language." Multi-year projects shipped late, incomplete, or not at all — while competitors iterated on the ugly system that made money.
Framework · 2023–now
LLM app frameworks
Chains, agents, and prompt wrappers shipping weekly. The durable pieces will be boring: evals, retrieval, and product UX.
Practice · 2021–now
AI pair programming
Autocomplete that actually understands the file. Changing how code is written faster than how it's reviewed.