Ideas Weave Every Narrative with AI.
Legacy code isn’t just technical debt—it’s a company’s institutional memory, containing years of unstated business rules and edge cases. AI rebuilds won’t recover that knowledge, making the ‘rewrite with AI’ promise a dangerous fantasy. The real cost of rebuilding isn’t code; it’s the expensive process of rediscovering forgotten logic.
AI coding assistants promise speed but deliver bloat. A developer vibecoded an iOS app to 35,000 lines and lost track of what it did. The bottleneck hasn’t disappeared — it shifted from writing code to understanding it. The AI era doesn’t eliminate software engineering. It makes it the one skill you can’t afford to skip.
AI code migration isn’t about translating line by line. It’s about designing a process that produces code. Anthropic’s six-step method shows how one developer used Claude to migrate 530,000 lines from Zig to Rust in 11 days, spending $165,000 in API fees — but saving years of developer time. The real bottleneck? Your process design, not AI capability.