Engineering and legacy area
Your code slows you down.
So does the new one.
Code duplication is up 81% and maintenance cost reaches 4x by the second year. Yesterday's debt and what AI is writing today are the same problem.
The new legacy
It's being written right now, at the speed of AI
Yesterday's debt built up slowly. Today's accumulates at the speed an assistant generates code, and traditional tools can't tell it apart from hand-written code.
- +81%
- Code duplication versus pre-AI
- +47%
- Error-masking constructs
- ~40%
- New code rewritten within two weeks
- 4x
- Maintenance cost by the second year
Public sources: FinOps Foundation State of FinOps 2026, GitClear study on 153 million lines, 2026 productivity benchmarks.
Diagnosis
2-3 weeks
Free
Codebase X-ray
Risk map, top 10 critical areas and the cost of the debt in euros and in days — time lost per release, incidents, onboarding — plus a phased paydown plan.
Pilot Build
3 weeks
First area freed
One critical area made safe: tests for coverage first, then refactoring. Finished and useful even if you stop here.
Build
8-12 weeks
Debt paydown
Incremental replacement (strangler fig), AI-assisted rewriting, never a big bang: the system stays live throughout.
Stewardship
Retainer
Debt stewardship
CI thresholds, a debt budget per sprint, periodic review and separate measurement of AI-generated code.
What you get
One area at a time, never a big bang
The system stays live throughout, and every phase produces a result that stands on its own if you stop there.
Risk map
Which areas get touched most, which break most, which only one person can touch. Where those three overlap is where we start.
The cost of the debt, in euros
Time lost per release, incidents, time to onboard someone new. It turns a future investment into a present loss.
Test coverage, first
No refactoring without a net: first we write tests describing current behaviour, then we touch the code.
Incremental replacement
Strangler fig: the new grows around the old and replaces it piece by piece, with the option to stop at every step.
CI gates
Thresholds that stop the debt coming back in through the window: duplication, complexity and coverage checked on every pull request.
Synthetic-code measurement
AI-generated code measured separately from human code, because it behaves differently and has to be governed differently.
Questions we get
What people ask before signing
- No, and that's the heart of the method. Incremental replacement runs alongside new features: if a freeze were needed, it would mean the plan is wrong.
Contact us
A quote, a particular request, or simply a coffee to meet us? Write to us and we will reply to a "nano-second".