One of the most surprising benefits of AI-assisted coding is that it finally makes rewriting a project practical.

Back in 1970, Winston W. Royce *, in his paper Managing the Development of Large Software Systems, suggested that the only way to build a great application is to write it twice. As he put it, “arrange matters so that the version finally delivered to the customer for operational deployment is actually the second version.”

The first pass teaches you what really works and what doesn’t. The second pass is when you get it right. In the past, rewriting a full project was too expensive and time-consuming, so most teams just pushed forward with whatever they had. But with AI code generation, we can now revisit the same idea multiple times without months of extra effort, refining it each time until it’s something truly solid.

It’s like old wisdom finally caught up with the tools we have today.



* Winston W. Royce, Managing the Development of Large Software Systems is usually seen as the origin of the Waterfall method of Software Engineering