Brownfield migration without a rewrite

Make existing infrastructure inspectable in place. No forklift, no “we will rebuild on the new stack next quarter”.

The claim is that inspectability can be had without a rewrite, and that the rewrite is almost always the wrong instrument. A system can be made to declare itself — what it is, what it depends on, what it does — without being replaced, and the declaration can be checked.

The instinct to rebuild comes from a real problem, which is that the systems we inherit are illegible. But illegibility is a property of the description, not of the machine. Fix the description first, and the machine may turn out to be fine.