Review Before Rewrite
Most rewrites are reviews that were never written down.
[ essay ]
The rewrite urge is usually a confession that nobody read the existing system carefully.
I felt it running the mystic-bytes essay pass: ninety-two files, generic briefs, placeholder voice — surely easier to regenerate from scratch. It was not. A rewrite without a review would have destroyed slugs, numbers, and a year of sort keys for no gain. Reading first produced a style guide, a tier classification, and a surgical edit plan. The greenfield fantasy shrank into targeted rewrites once I mapped the load-bearing assumptions.
They reach for the blank repo because legacy code looks unintelligible when no one on the current team has done the intelligence work. A memo costs an afternoon. A rewrite costs a quarter and often reproduces the same bugs with better formatting.
Read first. Write what you found. Identify the three assumptions you cannot break. The rewrite worth doing is the one still standing after that memo.
— JV · Dark Heart Labs.