> what the fuck were all of you doing? Hotfixing fires caused by brittle software, causing more brittle software. > How was he able to replace an entire stack

> what the fuck were all of you doing? Hotfixing fires caused by brittle software, causing more brittle software. > How was he able to replace an entire stack in less than a month There weren't hundreds of thousands of lines of code. The conceptual model was already mature and well-understood. So there was little new understanding to be gained, only fixing bugs in a second iteration. > without introducing huge amounts of logical errors? Supposedly by being a good engineer who tests things against the existing solution and new tests. > The "healthcheck" that is provided is just junk Yes, the whole story seems made up. A moral of the story may be: Build huts with mud, and skyscrapers with steel. There are so many historical precedents to suggest that rewriting anything from scratch is extremely risky. This story, while it may be fake, suggests that you shouldn't altogether abandon the idea and live in mediocrity. As a person without a huge amount of legacy risk on my shoulders, I like that.