WORK
Things You Should Never Do, Part I
Spolsky's April 2000 essay arguing that rewriting a codebase from scratch is almost always catastrophic, because the old code contains implicit knowledge — bug fixes, edge case handling, hard-won workarounds — that is invisible to someone reading it casually and rediscovered only at great cost.
'Things You Should Never Do, Part I' is Spolsky's April 2000 essay on Netscape's decision to rewrite its browser from scratch — a decision that took three years, during which Netscape's market share collapsed and the company never fully recovered. The essay's central claim is that old code looks ugly because reality has educated it: every unexplained workaround, every comment that says 'do not remove this line,' every piece of code that looks unnecessary represents a lesson learned through painful experience. The new rewrite looks clean because it has not yet learned any lessons. It will learn them — at the same cost in time and pain as the old code paid — or it will fail because it never learns them. The essay's framework applies with uncanny precision to
AI-generated code, which is the ultimate clean rewrite: generated from patterns, not from experience, educated