Paying Down Knowledge Debt: The Rewrite Temptation
In my last post I wrote about Knowledge Debt, what happens when we stop understanding the systems we ship. The obvious follow-up: what do we do about it, especially in the large, long-lived codebases where it has compounded the longest?
AI coding demonstrations rarely resemble those systems. They start from an empty folder, which has no history to misunderstand. We work in the opposite conditions: decades of accumulated behaviour, outdated documentation, and critical rules living only in the memory of people who may have long since left.