logoalt Hacker News

tripledryyesterday at 12:14 PM1 replyview on HN

I'm wondering how much value there is in a rewrite once you factor in that no one understands the new implementation as well as the old one.

Not only is it difficult to verify, but also the knowledge your team had of your messy codebase is now mostly gone. I would argue there is value in knowing your codebase and that you can't have the same level of understanding with AI generated code vs yours.


Replies

pphyschyesterday at 2:50 PM

The point of a rewrite is to safely delete most of that arcane knowledge required to operate the old system, by reducing the operational complexity of it.