It's time to demolish the sacred cow: your codebase.

Well-architected codebases carry meaning in their structure — that's the whole point of Clean Architecture. But let's be honest: most of ours aren't that. And especially not the ones built through vibe coding sessions.

In Clean Architecture, Robert Martin describes a cycle every engineer has lived through: a new team inherits a rotting codebase, decides to rewrite it from scratch, and years later... the new codebase rots too. The rewrite gets rewritten. The cycle never ends.

Why? Because we've always treated code as the asset. The codebase is sacred. Don't touch what works. Don't introduce regression. Find a workaround. This is deeply embedded in software culture — no employer wants to hear "we need to start over." And coding agents have inherited this exact instinct from us, because every piece of training data, every engineering culture artifact tells them the same thing: preserve the existing code at all costs.

I fell into this trap myself. Both me and my AI agents treated the existing codebase as too valuable to discard. When we hit walls — real architectural walls — we tried to patch around them instead of confronting the fundamental problem. We were afraid. We felt defeated. The sunk cost felt real.

But here's the truth: the codebase built through vibe coding sessions is worth nothing. What it gave us — a deeper understanding of the problem space, clarity on what the architecture actually needs to be — that's everything.

OpenAI's recent "Harness Engineering" post describes a team that shipped a million-line product with zero manually written code. Their insight resonates: the engineer's job is no longer to write code, but to design environments, specify intent, and build feedback loops. The repository's knowledge base — design docs, architecture maps, quality grades — is the real product. The code is generated output.

This reframing unlocked something for me. I'm now experimenting with a workflow inspired by what OpenAI describes — where the repository's real product isn't code, but a structured knowledge base: solution design docs, architecture maps, domain boundaries, quality grades, and execution plans. All versioned, all maintained, all mechanically enforced. A living system of record that any agent can navigate and build from.

Within this framework:

• The design documentation is the single source of truth, continuously refined as we explore deeper into the problem space.
• Every time we hit a fundamental wall, we improve the design and tear out the rotten parts entirely — no patching, no workarounds.
• We rebuild those parts from zero. Every time.

The rebuilt sections won't be identical each time — AI agents will take infinite possible paths to get there. But if a rebuild fails at a point that a previous attempt already solved, that's not a code problem. That's the design doc lacking clarity. The doc is the contract. Sharpen it until any agent can fulfill it.

This isn't the Clean Architecture rewrite death spiral — but I'll be honest about the scope. This works for small to mid-scale projects, and especially for ones started fresh. If you're sitting on a large existing codebase with years of embedded domain knowledge, you can't just torch it and expect an AI to regenerate the meaning. I'm only in a position to work this way because I'm not clinging onto anything yet. The point isn't that everyone should nuke their codebase tomorrow. The point is that if you can — if you're early enough — stop treating code as the thing worth protecting.

This post isn't about presenting the ultimate architecture that solves everything. I'm still experimenting. But the shift in values is clear: stop protecting code. Start protecting clarity of design.

We are in a world where code is worth nothing. Act like it.