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AI changes the economics of software rewrites

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AI changes rewrite economics because codebases with clear, common patterns get more leverage than proprietary or inconsistent systems.

My view on software rewrites has changed because of AI.

The quality of AI output isn't determined solely by your prompt.

It's determined by what the model already knows from training data, and the context you give it to work with.

For coding tasks, most of that context is the codebase.

Popular tech stacks have an AI advantage because the model has seen millions of examples, including published sources.

The opposite is true for proprietary languages and private frameworks, with inconsistent patterns - these have to be taught - mostly using the limited context window available to models.

Compare these two workflows:

Read the feature specification.

Read a codebase with clear, consistent, well-established patterns.

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