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Sep 13, 2026 · R&D Management

Code Rewrites: When Programmer Ego Trumps Business Value — 4 Decision Criteria

The article argues most rewrites satisfy programmer aesthetics, not business needs; stable legacy code encodes hard-won bug fixes; rewrites risk reintroducing old bugs; four concrete criteria justify rewrites: unsupported dependencies with vulnerabilities, knowledge silos, measurable productivity decline, or business outgrowing architecture; AI lowers rewrite cost but not the risk of lost context.