When to rebuild vs when to patch, as a non-technical founder
How to evaluate the recommendation without being an engineer yourself.
"We need to rebuild this" is one of the hardest recommendations for a non-technical founder to evaluate — it's expensive, it's disruptive, and it's coming from the person you're relying on to tell you the truth about something you can't independently verify. There are still real questions worth asking.
Ask what specifically breaks, not how it feels
"It feels outdated" is a weak justification for a rebuild. "It can't handle more than X concurrent users without falling over" or "every new feature now takes three times as long because of how this was built" are specific, checkable claims worth taking seriously.
Ask for the incremental alternative
A full rebuild should be able to justify itself against the incremental alternative: what if we fixed the worst three problems instead of starting over? If nobody's seriously evaluated that option, the rebuild recommendation hasn't earned its cost yet.
Get a second technical opinion
A rebuild recommendation is exactly the kind of decision worth a second, independent technical opinion — not because the first one is necessarily wrong, but because it's expensive enough, and hard enough to verify yourself, that the cost of a second opinion is trivial by comparison.
- Ask for specific, checkable reasons — not a vague sense that something feels outdated.
- Make sure the incremental alternative was seriously considered first.
- A rebuild recommendation is worth getting a second technical opinion on.
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