Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business
Summary
The article argues that rewrites primarily benefit engineers rather than the business, using personal anecdotes to illustrate the cost and risk of needless rewrites. It emphasizes preserving production code and learning from existing design, while proposing concrete triggers for when a rewrite is warranted and the importance of documenting the rationale. It also discusses how AI can make rewrites cheaper to generate but not automatically correct without proper context and governance.