{"id":8773,"date":"2026-02-25T10:05:23","date_gmt":"2026-02-25T15:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/frontendmasters.com\/blog\/?p=8773"},"modified":"2026-02-25T10:05:24","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T15:05:24","slug":"working-with-legacy-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/frontendmasters.com\/blog\/working-with-legacy-code\/","title":{"rendered":"Working with Legacy Code"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>From Nicholas C. Zakas&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/newsletter.humanwhocodes.com\/posts\/human-who-codes-newsletter-working-with-legacy-code\">regularly interesting newsletter<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>The best way to work with legacy code is to approach it patiently\u2014understand small parts, write tests, and document what you learn.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>My favorite line about legacy code, which I&#8217;ve probably shared too much, is when David Khourshid called it &#8220;Legendary Code&#8221;. Legacy code feels a smidge mean for code that&#8217;s been around a long time, doing exactly what it should. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I do wonder, in this age of AI, how it affects our desire to rid our code bases of &#8220;legacy&#8221; code. Will we be too quick to do it? Or is AI just what we need to make sure the new code is rigorously tested in a way that many of us are too lazy to do manually?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Nicholas C. Zakas&#8217;s regularly interesting newsletter: The best way to work with legacy code is to approach it patiently\u2014understand small parts, write tests, and document what you learn. My favorite line about legacy code, which I&#8217;ve probably shared too much, is when David Khourshid called it &#8220;Legendary Code&#8221;. Legacy code feels a smidge mean [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8781,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sig_custom_text":"","sig_image_type":"featured-image","sig_custom_image":0,"sig_is_disabled":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[104,457],"class_list":["post-8773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-beat","tag-ai","tag-legacy-code"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/frontendmasters.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/pexels-photo-5637731.jpeg?fit=867%2C1300&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/frontendmasters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/frontendmasters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/frontendmasters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frontendmasters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frontendmasters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8773"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/frontendmasters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8782,"href":"https:\/\/frontendmasters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8773\/revisions\/8782"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frontendmasters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/frontendmasters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frontendmasters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frontendmasters.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}