alt Hacker NewsIn ~25 years or so of dealing with large, existing codebases, I've seen time and time again that there's a ton of business value and domain knowledge locked up inside all of that "messy" code. Weird edge cases that weren't well covered in the design, defensive checks and data validations, bolted-on extensions and integrations, etc., etc.
"Just rewrite it" is usually -- not always, but _usually_ -- a sure path to a long, painful migration that usually ends up not quite reproducing the old features/capabilities and adding new bugs and edge cases along the way.
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When an LLM can rewrite it in 24 hours and fill the missing parts in minutes that argument is hard to defend.
I can vibe code what a dev shop would charge 500k to build and I can solo it in 1-2 weeks. This is the reality today. The code will pass quality checks, the code doesn’t need to be perfect, it doesn’t need to be cleaver it needs to be.
It’s not difficult to see this right? If an LLM can write English it can write Chinese or python.
Then it can run itself, review itself and fix itself.
The cat is out of bag, what it will do to the economy… I don’t see anything positive for regular people. Write some code has turned into prompt some LLM. My phone can outplay the best chess player in the world, are you telling me you think that whatever unbound model anthropic has sitting in their data center can’t out code you?
If the LLM just wrote the whole thing last week, surely it can write it again.
Classic Joel Spolsky:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
> the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:
> rewrite the code from scratch.