Taming a Legacy Codebase with Claude: A Field Report on Refactoring, Race Conditions, and Technical Debt
Why This Article Exists
Every engineering team eventually inherits a codebase that has outgrown its original design. Features were shipped, deadlines were met, and somewhere along the way the foundations quietly cracked. Hardcoded secrets found their way into source control. async void started creeping into timer callbacks. Collections got shared across threads without locks. A comment saying // TODO: fix this properly quietly turned into a permanent resident.