North Pine Work

Engineering

Migrating legacy systems without a full rewrite

October 21, 2025 5 min read

The instinct to rewrite a legacy system from scratch is understandable, and usually wrong. Rewrites fail for a predictable reason: the old system encodes years of decisions nobody remembers making, and a rewrite has to rediscover all of them under a deadline.

We favor incremental replacement behind a stable interface, moving one capability at a time while the legacy system keeps running. It's slower to start and faster to finish, and it never puts the business in a position where both systems are broken at once.

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