🔗 The Greenfield

There is a specific, intoxicating smell in the software industry. It smells like fresh coffee, whiteboard markers, and the absolute certainty that this time, we are going to do it right. It is the allure of the Greenfield project. We look at our existing codebase. We look at that sprawling, patched-together monolith that currently pays our salaries, and we sneeze at it. We call it “legacy.” We call it “tech debt.” We convince management that the only way to move forward is to burn it down and start fresh.

This is the single most expensive delusion in engineering.

Junior developers, in particular, are drawn to Greenfield projects like moths to a very expensive flame. It makes sense. They haven’t been around long enough to see a “perfect” architecture rot from the inside out. To them, the blank repository is freedom. It is a chance to use Rust, or Go, or whatever JavaScript framework was invented during lunch. They believe that the messiness of the old system was a result of incompetence rather than the natural accumulation of business requirements. They think they can code their way out of complexity.

But here is the truth that hurts: You cannot fix a people problem with a new repository.