Never Rewrite: Software Engineering & AI Coding

In Episode 9 we start our first of many 'F*ck-up Fridays', where we talk about an interesting or crazy thing that has happened to a company we've worked at. Today Isaac talks about an early startup he worked for that ultimately failed after its customers were raided by the FBI.

Brian Begy is a guest in this week's episode. Brian shares his experience with companies that have attempted to transform software built for internal processes to using and selling it as a service.

Jeffrey brings up the concept of risk in this episode, tying it back to our previous conversation with guests Nathan Keyes and Colleen Grafton in Episode 4 where we discussed their project 'Nozomi'.

In this episode Isaac and Jeffrey discuss patterns they've seen in both highly performant and poorly-performing teams - how team culture is shaped, how overall company culture helps shape it, and why trust is one of the most important drivers of great teams.

Jeffrey introduces the concept of 'perverse incentives' for rewriting - reasons for rewriting that are pushed not for a better product or for the customer, but for the benefit of the engineer or the manager responsible for the project.

In this episode Isaac and Jeffrey invite Colleen Grafton and Nathan Keyes to talk about a shared experience of a rewrite gone wrong - and what to learn from it.

In this episode Isaac talks about his early experience understanding the importance of testing, and reflects on three distinct reasons why testing seems to be hated by developers.

In this episode we provide an alternative to rewriting a codebase from scratch: iteratively replacing bits of functionality over time.

In our pilot episode of “Never Rewrite”, we discuss what we mean when we tell developers to never rewrite code. Isaac reflects on what drives engineers to rewrite, and Jeffrey adds some real-world analogies involving baseball and New York stadiums.