We might inform Claude to make use of fashionable coding strategies, to write down neat, modular code, and to re-architect the codebase utilizing clear coding strategies which might be simple to take care of and broaden. We might have Claude make the code look fashionable and constant throughout the whole utility. We might have the app run on Home windows, the Mac, and Linux in addition to within the browser. We might create our dream codebase if we had been thorough sufficient in our specification and diligent sufficient in our monitoring of the method.
A legacy taboo
I wager the entire thing might be executed in weeks (days?) as an alternative of the years that it will take to do by hand. And why not? What do we now have to lose?
Now, rewriting code from scratch is precisely what Joel Spolsky informed us we should always by no means do. However that was 26 years in the past, and I’m going to say that Spolsky didn’t foresee coding brokers. Spolsky’s first level is that the previous, legacy code holds years of company data and edge-case options that may’t presumably be recaptured in a brand new model. However these are exactly the sorts of issues a coding agent can see and might seize. Spolsky’s second level — {that a} wholesale rewrite means years of not transport something new — is made moot by the pace with which it might be executed.
