We once audited a fast-growing SaaS platform that had built the same core feature three times.

The first version was hacked together for launch.

The second was overengineered for scale—but never fully adopted.

The third was more usable, but lacked consistency across clients.

Each rebuild felt like progress. But they were solving the same problem every time—because the root issues had never been addressed.

Rewrites are rarely technical decisions—they’re design failures

You don’t rebuild because the code is broken. You rebuild because:

• The UX doesn’t match real user needs

• The architecture didn’t anticipate edge cases

• The team who wrote it has moved on

• The current version is untestable or unextendable

The mistake? Treating each rebuild as a reset, rather than an opportunity to learn.

What’s really behind repeat builds?

1. Misaligned assumptions

   Each team had a different idea of what the feature was for—and no shared understanding of the problem it was solving.

2. Tech debt that no one felt responsible for

   Everyone knew the code was fragile. But without ownership, improvement never became anyone’s priority.

3. Shifting stakeholders

   As new leadership joined, priorities shifted. But the old code stayed—until someone decided to throw it away again.

Stop rebuilding. Start preserving knowledge.

If your team is rebuilding the same thing more than once, you don’t need better code—you need better memory:

• Clear documentation of why decisions were made

• Retrospectives that capture what didn’t work (and what did)

• Ownership that survives org chart changes

• Design with a longer lifespan in mind

We talked more about this in Why Documentation is the Developer’s Best Friend, because the lack of written decisions is often what causes teams to restart instead of evolve.

Conclusion: Rebuilds aren’t failures—if you treat them like lessons

Sometimes a rewrite is the right call. But if you’re not learning from what came before, you’re not improving—you’re just looping.

At DevRoom, we help teams break the cycle. Build smarter. Plan better. Leave behind more than code.