It's Time to Rewrite All That Old Code
InfoWorld, Wednesday, October 14th, 2026
After Claude Code ported his 1970s BASIC game in under a minute, a veteran developer asks if legacy rewrites are next.
The author recounts spending months porting a BASIC Star Trek game to an IBM 5100 in the 1970s, then watching Claude Code convert it to WebAssembly via Go in under a minute.
He argues it will not be long before AI can tackle large legacy codebases written by many people over decades, the big balls of mud that no one fully understands.
The column considers what that means for teams maintaining millions of lines of legacy code and why the long-deferred rewrite may soon be practical.