So long, legacy software
First, legacy software is going to become a thing of the past. You know what I’m talking about—those big balls of mud that have accreted over the last 30 years. The one started by your cousin’s friend who wrote that software for your dad’s laundromat and is now the software recommended by the Coin Laundry Association. The one with seven million lines of hopeless spaghetti code that no one person actually understands, that uses ancient, long-outdated technology, that is impossible to maintain but somehow still works. The one that depends on an entire team of developers and support people to keep running.
Well, someone is going to come along and write a completely fresh, new, unmuddy version of that ball of mud with a coding agent. The perfect example of this is happening in open source with Cloudflare’s EmDash project. Now don’t get me wrong. I have a deep respect for WordPress, the CMS that basically runs the internet. It’s venerable and battle-tested—and bloated and insecure and written in PHP.
EmDash is a “spiritual successor” to WordPress. Cloudflare basically asked, “What would WordPress look like if we started building it today?” Then they started building it using agentic coding, and basically did in a couple of months what WordPress took 24 years to do. Sure, they had WordPress as a template, but it was only because of agentic coding that they were even willing to attempt it. It’s long been thought foolish to say “Let’s rebuild the whole thing from scratch.” Now, with agentic coding, it seems foolish not to.
