Continuous Delivery 2.0

Sep 30, 2026 · Backend Development

AI Refactoring Legacy Systems: The 17 Unwritten Rules Agents Quietly Delete

The article critiques the "Plan mode is dead" claim, arguing that AI agents refactoring legacy systems risk deleting critical undocumented business rules like compliance requirements and historical compromises because they lack characterization tests and explicit invariants, advocating for hypothesis-driven planning with ADRs, strangler fig pattern, and rollback capabilities.