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7 Warning Signs Your Codebase Is Becoming Legacy and How to Fix It
Spot them early. Fix them now. Save yourself a rewrite later.
Most advice about legacy code starts in the wrong place. It tells you what to do once you already have it. By then, your options are already narrow.
Rewrites become tempting. Refactors get scoped down to survival work. Velocity has already dropped, and you are spending real money on the slowdown.
The more useful question is how to recognize a codebase that is heading there. You want to catch it while you still have leverage.
The good news? The signs show up early. Here are the seven I watch for, plus how to fix each one.
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1. Onboarding Is Getting Slower
This is the slow drift sign. New hires used to ship their first PR in two weeks. Now it takes five.
Nobody noticed because each hire is just one data point. But the trend is real.
The code is not unreadable yet. It is just getting harder to read, one merge at a time.
Tribal knowledge is piling up in senior heads. The setup steps from last year are missing a…
