alt Hacker NewsIt'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.
Replies
causal • yesterday at 1:45 PM
I think it was always hyperbolic to call rewrites the single greatest mistake (I can think of worse) but I think most of the wisdom still holds. And AI generated rewrites are arguably riskier because now NOBODY is familiar with the massive codebase.
> It's funny, but I think the article is showing it's age. It's no longer true.
Joel argues 2 effects:
# Developer & time-cost of a rewrite is a big unknown. That's still true, but LLMs may cut that down by a factor of 10x or more. You cut time & developer-hours by throwing tokens ($) at it. An optimist might say this cost has vanished.
# Shipping a rewritten product is -by itself- an unknown risk. That still holds. You can do all the testing you want, but your test suite != your clients environment(s? multiply by number of users or target platforms).
A single bug that pops up in the rewritten codebase (which wasn't in the old one) can hurt a vendor's reputation badly if the stars align just right.
All in all Joel's article held up pretty well (esp. given how long ago it was written).