The Architectural Diff — Three Migration Paths, Argue for the Clever One
Given this codebase and a sentence describing what it should become, generate three migration paths — safe-and-slow, bold, and clever. Argue for the clever one.
Why this exists
Migration plans converge on safe-and-slow because risk is the only dimension that's legible to the room approving the plan. Boldness and cleverness are systematically under-proposed — not because they're worse, but because nobody gets fired for the strangler fig. A model that volunteers all three paths corrects for that bias before the conversation calcifies around the most defensible option.
What you get back
- Three migration plans with concrete steps, ordered from cautious to inventive.
- Risk and timeline estimates per plan, stated plainly enough to compare.
- A written argument for the clever path, naming which property of the existing system enables it.
- An honest assessment of what could go wrong on the clever path — and which signals would tell you to fall back.
When to reach for this pattern
Use it kicking off a major migration, before the org locks into the first plausible plan. Use it as a pre-mortem on a planned rewrite, to surface the path the team's caution is hiding. Use it when you need to make the case for a non-obvious route to an audience that defaults to caution — three options on the table reframes the clever one from reckless to considered.
Given this codebase and a sentence describing what it should
become, generate three migration paths. The safe-and-slow one —
no downtime, all reversible, every step independently shippable.
The bold one — rewrite the bottleneck, accept the risk, two-week
cut. The clever one — a path nobody on the team would think of,
that uses some property of the existing system to do the migration
in a way that's less work than expected. Argue for the clever one.Paste this into Claude, Cursor, or Copilot. Change one thing that matters to you.
What I learned shipping it
- Most migration plans are safe-and-slow because that's what gets approved, not what's best.
- The clever path is rarely seen because it requires reading the existing system as an asset, not a constraint.
- Advocating for the clever path is the highest-leverage thing a senior engineer can do.