[cageface]

Agreed. Rapidly chewing through prototypes in the early stages of a project is a great way to weed out bad ideas.

Rewriting stable production code, on the other hand, is almost always a mistake.

[kemiller]

Depends on what you mean by stable, and what you mean by rewrite. If your end result is buggy and unstable, it's sometimes worth using it as a rough draft and starting over. Ground up rewrites in a successful environment (which was the subject of the article) are usually wrong.

Planned, incremental refactoring or re-architecture can be quite beneficial if done right.

[cageface]

Certainly. Continuous & judicious refactoring is the best way to avoid getting into this fix in the first place and is also generally the best way to dig yourself out.