The value of long lived software in AI driven world

Over a quarter of a century ago, Joel Spolsky wrote about Netscape’s decision to rewrite its browser from scratch, which later led to Firefox. He called it Things You Should Never Do, Part I.I remember reading that article at the time and fully agreeing with him. As a side note, it is well worth the time to go through the archive of his posts. Even today, a lot of them hold up very well.Reading it back again, I found the following quote, which is really appropriate today:Before Borland’s new spreadsheet for Windows shipped, Philippe Kahn, the colorful founder of Borland, was quoted a lot in the press bragging about how Quattro Pro would be much better than Microsoft Excel, because it was written from scratch. All new source code! As if source code rusted.To be clear, he was writing in (April 2000) about something that happened in 1992, so 34 years ago. That statement is still very much in force today. Another quote from this article that still lives in my head is:Back to that two page…