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AI and the Economics of Legacy Software

A few weeks ago, I started thinking about a software project that I had almost completely forgotten. In 2013, Juanjo Meroño and I built LooWID, an open source video conferencing platform based on WebRTC. Some time later, Edu Rey joined us to help with the UI, giving the project an important qualitative leap in its user experience and making the product feel much more complete. We developed it for several years, adapting it to the rapidly changing browser and WebRTC ecosystem, until around 2018–2019 we eventually stopped maintaining it.The code remained public. The product remained there. But the technology around it moved on. Years later, I wondered what would happen if we tried to bring it back—not by trying to make the old application run again, but by asking AI to help us rebuild the product. The original project is still available on GitHub , and the result of the experiment is LooWID Remastered . From legacy code to a working product I used OpenCode as the main development agent. ...

AI Is Changing the Economics of Prototyping

From imagining software to experiencing it before it exists For more than two decades, Agile has transformed the way software is built. Its principles emerged in response to a world where requirements evolved continuously, long development cycles created unnecessary risk, and organisations needed mechanisms to learn while delivering value. By breaking work into small, working increments, Agile enabled teams to reduce implementation risk, gather feedback early and continuously refine their products. Prototyping has followed a similar objective. Long before generative AI, paper sketches, wireframes, clickable mock-ups and interface design tools were widely used to explore ideas, capture requirements and help stakeholders understand a problem before committing to implementation. These techniques have always been valuable because they encourage discussion at a stage where change is still inexpensive. The limitation was never the concept of prototyping itself. It was the cost of realism. B...