Maintenance and Updates › When to Rebuild vs. Maintain

Sometimes you'll face a choice: keep patching the current system, or rebuild it better. This is a hard decision, but here are some guidelines:

Keep Maintaining When:

• The core architecture is sound
• Changes are incremental improvements
• Users are generally satisfied
• The codebase is manageable

Consider Rebuilding When:

• The architecture can't support new requirements
• Maintenance is becoming harder and slower
• Technical debt is overwhelming
• User needs have fundamentally changed

Rebuilding is expensive and risky, so it's usually a last resort. But sometimes it's the right choice. If you do rebuild, apply everything you've learned from maintaining the current system to build something more maintainable.