Or: How I Rewrote Everything, Gave Away Two Free Cars, and Saved $32M
Week One: The Numbers
New CTO. Corner office. Finally made it.
VP of Engineering closes the door: “$50M technology budget. $40M—80%—goes to legacy maintenance. $2M—4%—goes to new products.”
You’re spending 80% chasing the past while competitors invest 100% in the future.
She shows you Chen’s pricing engine. Built in 2015. 52,000 lines. Costs $5.8M annually to maintain. “Whatever you do, don’t propose a rewrite. We tried twice. Both failed.”
You just inherited a $40M time bomb.
Week Two: The Experiment
You open the new AI coding tools. Feed Chen’s requirements in. Eight minutes later: 3,400 lines of working code.
Four months of human work → six hours with AI.
Test it: works for 99.4% of cases. Misses edge cases like billionaires with Bitcoin collateral.
Estimated annual cost: $375K versus $5.8M.
You do the math: 93.5% cost reduction on ONE service.
The Heresy
Friday. Leadership meeting.
“Chen’s code costs us $5.8M annually. I regenerated it with AI for $375K. It handles 99.4% of cases. The 0.6% it misses—maybe fifty weird cases a year—we handle manually.”
VP of Engineering: “But the edge cases—”
“Cost us $15K annually in manual reviews versus $5.8M in perfect automation. At the macro level, I’ll give away a free $180K car once a year if it means saving $5.4M.”
CFO is doing math: “How many services can you do this to?”
“All of them. We have 1.2 million lines of legacy code consuming $40M annually. I can regenerate the entire system as 120,000 lines—10% of the original—for under $8M annually.”
CEO: “You want to rewrite everything?”
“I want to delete everything and regenerate it. In ninety days. Free up $32M of our budget—64%—and move from quarterly releases to weekly.”
“What if things break?”
“Then we handle them. We give white-glove service. If we accidentally approve a billionaire’s weird loan, we make him a customer for life. If we mess up badly, we give away a car and call it marketing. That’s still cheaper than spending $40M maintaining perfection.”
“What do you need?”
“Permission to burn the shrine. And your backing when I give away two free cars.”
The 90-Day Blitz
You don’t ask permission twice. You move.
Month 1:
- Pricing engine: 52,000 lines → 3,400 lines. Cost: $5.8M → $375K.
- Credit decisioning: 68,000 lines → 4,200 lines. Cost: $4.8M → $320K.
- Document generation: 45,000 lines → 2,800 lines. Cost: $3.2M → $280K.
Month 2:
- Eight more services rewritten
- Total code: 1.2M lines → 180,000 lines (15% of original)
- Release cycle: quarterly → weekly
- Legacy cost: $40M → $12M
Month 3:
- Four more services
- Final code: 1.2M lines → 120,000 lines (10% of original)
- Legacy cost: $40M → $8M
- Budget freed: $32M (64% of total technology budget)
Edge cases encountered: 187 Manually handled: 187 Cost: $8,500 Previous cost of perfect automation: $26.4M
Free cars given away: 2 Cost: $360K PR value: $800K Customer referrals from those two cases: $420K in margin
Week 12: The Results
Board presentation.
Budget reallocation:
- Before: 80% legacy maintenance, 4% new products
- After: 16% legacy maintenance, 68% new products
- Freed up: $32M annually
System transformation:
- Code: 1.2M lines → 120,000 lines (90% reduction)
- Releases: 4/year → 52/year (13x faster)
- Cost per release: $1.45M → $7,200 (99.5% reduction)
The two free cars:
- Billionaire Bitcoin loan: Auto-approved erroneously, gave white-glove service, he referred eight customers worth $340K
- Multi-state edge case: System glitched, gave customer exceptional experience, became case study in customer service
- Total cost: $360K. Total value: $1.2M.
CEO: “You rewrote our entire system in ninety days?”
“I didn’t rewrite it. I deleted 90% of it and regenerated 10% with AI. The code that took us a decade to write took ninety days to regenerate.”
“And those free cars?”
“Best money we ever spent. Those two customers are telling everyone we’re the smoothest company they’ve ever worked with. That’s better than perfect code.”
Board member: “Previous CTOs proposed three-year transformations. You did it in ninety days. How?”
“Previous CTOs tried to preserve the shrine. I burned it.”
“They spent $40M maintaining 1.2 million lines to achieve 100% perfection. I spend $8M maintaining 120,000 lines to achieve 99.4% perfection and legendary service on the 0.6%.”
“They shipped quarterly because they were terrified of breaking things. I ship weekly because breaking things and fixing them fast is cheaper than perfection.”
“At the macro level: giving away two $180K cars is cheaper than spending $32M on code that prevents us from ever giving away cars.”
Six Months Later
Your VP of Engineering: “When you deleted Chen’s code on day fifteen, I thought you were insane. When you gave away that first free car in month two, I thought you’d be fired.”
“But then I realized: you understood something the other CTOs didn’t.”
“The code was never the asset. Moving fast was the asset. And you could regenerate the code for 10% of the space at 20% of the cost.”
“Previous CTOs couldn’t accept giving away a car. You understood that two free cars is cheaper than $32M in legacy maintenance.”
“They worshipped perfection. You worshipped velocity.”
To You
Check your technology budget. If you’re spending >50% on legacy maintenance, you’re in danger.
If you’re spending >70%, you’re in crisis.
If you’re spending 80% like we were, you’re already losing.
Here’s the play:
Regenerate your entire system with AI. Reduce it to 10% of the original code. Accept that you’ll miss edge cases. Handle them with humans. If you mess up, give legendary service. If you really mess up, give away something and call it marketing.
At the macro level: Two free cars at $360K is cheaper than $32M in legacy maintenance.
In 90 days:
- Rewrite everything to 10% of original size
- Free up 60%+ of technology budget
- Ship 13x faster
- Accept imperfection
- Give away a couple cars if needed
Budget goes from 80% past, 4% future → 16% past, 68% future.
Your competitors are doing this now. The ones who move first will outspend you 15:1 on new products.
The window is twelve months. Maybe less.
Will you preserve the shrine while competitors lap you?
Or will you burn it, give away two cars, and invest 68% in the future?
Choose this week.
Because your competitor’s new CTO just did.
END
90 days. $32M freed. 90% less code. 2 free cars. 13x faster. Or watch competitors win while you maintain perfection.