Article URL: https://thetruthasiseeitnow.com/ai-slop-starts-with-the-codebase-itself/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48841446 Points: 35 # Comments: 41

AI changes rewrite economics because codebases with clear, common patterns get more leverage than proprietary or inconsistent systems. It's determined by what the model already knows from training data, and the context you give it to work with. 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. In the first workflow, the codebase has established patterns the model easily understands. In the second, the model spends effort inferring them before it can solve the problem. More context means more tokens, more prompting, more variance, and generally lower-quality output - aka cost. A rewrite isn't just an opportunity to modernise your technology stack - it's an opportunity to rebuild your codebase around clear, consistent patterns that play to AI's strengths instead of fighting them. You could either be using AI to solve the problem, or you could spend the time trying to get AI to learn your language first.