The future of migrations, again

I've written about AI-assisted migrations before (see here and here). But those are about what happens after you've decided to migrate something. What about the decision to do a migration in the first place? Many migrations don't have to happen immediately or at all. They're opportunities to fix technical debt, try new technology, or prepare for the future. Often, there's no structural reason to do these by migrating rather than by changing things in place. Many migrations happen because they are easier to justify to management, less painful for those whose mistakes caused the problem, and more fun. (I often recall the old sports saying that even when losing isn't the manager's fault, "it's easier to get rid of one manager than 25 players.") Here as elsewhere, this sounds more cynical than it is. Communicating in organizations is already hard, and justifying fix-it projects is even harder. "Migrating has wonderful benefits and also gets rid of some tech debt" usually sounds better…