As entertaining as that article was when it came out, I think its apparent wisdom should have been reevaluated for at least the past two decades. Even back when it was written, its pertinence was questionable, since it hinged on the perception that written code has particular value, to justify much of the failures at Netscape and Borland, neglecting many of the other -- probably more relevant -- business and human factors that were at play within the two organizations and their surrounding ecosystems. But lessons learned from watching startups fail in trove in the following two decades have mooted many of Joel's arguments. With the vantage of hindsight, if you read JWZ's account of what went on at Netscape, some of the dysfunctions become glaring.

Making software projects successful has always been about a lot more than just writing code. People have been "rewriting code from scratch" successfully even before LLMs. We just don't tend to call it that. We call it "cloning", "competition", "copy", "alternative-to", "reverse-engineering", "x-written-in-language-y", etc.

It's funny, but I think the article is showing it's age. It's no longer true.

In hindsight having automated auto complete rewriting your code base wasn't something on 2000's radar.

Now switching from language to language is much easier. Just for Rust, there was Ladybird and Bun complete rewrite, that ran into zero things that Joel rallied about.