Fellow tech-trash-disposal-engineer here. I've made a killing on replacing corporate anti-patterns. My career features such hits and old-time classics like:

email as workflow
email as version control
email as project management
email as literally anything other than email
excel as an relational database
excel as project management
help, our wiki is out of control
U-drive as a multi-user collaboration solution
The CEO's nephew wrote this 8 years ago and we can't get rid of it

In all of these cases, there were always better answers that maybe just cost a little bit more. AI will absolutely cause some players to train-wreck their business, all to save a buck, and we'll all be there to help clean up. Count on it.

[–] TurdBurgler@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 hours ago

It depends on the methodology. If you're trying to do a direct port. You're probably approaching it wrong.

What matters to the business most is data, your business objects and business logic make the business money.

If you focus on those parts and port portions at a time, you can substantially lower your tech debt and improve developer experiences, by generating greenfield code which you can verify, that follows modern best practices for your organization.

One of the main reasons many users are complaining about quality of code edited my agents comes down to the current naive tooling. Most using sloppy find/replace techniques with regex and user tools. As AI tooling improves, we are seeing agents given more IDE-like tools with intimate knowledge of your codebase using things like code indexing and ASTs. Look into Serena, for example.