Rewrites Are a Trap
Inspired by on Lenny's Podcast
Before you overhaul your child's bedtime routine, remember: you probably don't understand what the current one actually does.
Camille Fournier has seen countless engineering teams convince themselves that a complete rewrite will solve all their problems. Build something fresh. Start over. It'll be better this time.
It almost never works. Why?
First: they massively underestimate migration time. Moving from the old system to the new one takes three times longer than anyone expects.
Second, and this is the killer: they don't actually understand what the old system does. There's weird logic buried in there. Undocumented edge cases. Rules nobody remembers creating.
So they build the shiny new thing, and it breaks in ways the old system never did.
Parenting routines work the same way.
That bedtime ritual that feels tedious? It might be doing more than you realize. The specific order of stories, songs, and cuddles isn't random - it's accumulated wisdom about what calms your child down.
Want to change it? Proceed carefully. Don't blow it up and start over. Evolve it piece by piece. Keep what works. Fix what doesn't.
Fournier's advice: 'Take pieces of the old system, uplift them, make them better. But trying to just go away, rewrite, build something brand new - it just very rarely works.'
Revolutions fail. Evolutions succeed. Your current routines know more than you think they do.
PM Theme: Iteration over revolution
Parenting Theme: Evolving routines gradually
“People really underestimate what the old system does and how well they know what the old system does. There's so much logic buried in legacy systems, it tends to be undocumented, it tends to be weird. You haven't thought through all the business rules.”Camille Fournier · 00:18:28
“Take pieces potentially of the old system, uplift them, make them more scalable, make them easier to work with, clean up the tech debt, but trying to say we're going to just go away, we're going to rewrite, we're going to build something brand new and it's going to solve all our problems, it just very rarely works.”Camille Fournier · 00:19:14
