Practice · 1995–now · Platform Wars
Big-bang rewrite
Replace the working system instead of strangling it. A perennial money pit with new branding each decade.
Why Big-bang rewrite became a costly fad
Big-bang rewrites fail because the old system encodes decades of edge cases nobody documented. Freezing features freezes revenue while the rewrite discovers reality. Strangler fig patterns exist; ego prefers greenfield.
Cost of the fad
What Big-bang rewrite cost
"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.
Case studies
- Big-bang microservices cutover weekend — Weekend cutover rollback; months of dual-run and incident debt
- Digg v4 rewrites the product and the audience — Traffic collapse and sale; rewrite consumed a year of product oxygen
- AI codebase rewrite pilots that shipped nothing — Six-figure LLM API and SI costs; production cutover: zero
Patterns
Compare with
Related
Architecture · 2012–2023
Microservices Everywhere
Independent deployability as religion. Correct for some; ruinous cargo-cult for most. Consolidation and monolith return are the 2020s epilogue.
$ Teams split 4-person products into 40 services, then hired SREs to babysit the mesh. Many later consolidated — after years of distributed tracing invoices and on-call trauma. See case studies on premature microservices and big-bang cutovers for named failure modes.
Language · 2015–now
Rust
Memory safety without GC pauses. Climbing from systems niches into cloud infra and WASM.
Practice · 2023–now
AI will rewrite the codebase
Big-bang rewrite, now with a chatbot — then with agents. Same failure mode; prettier slides.
$ Exec decks promised autonomous migrations "by next quarter," then rebranded as "agentic modernization." Teams that skipped tests, ownership, and incremental strangler patterns bought expensive demos and fragile diffs.