AI Will Help You Build the Next Platform. Not Retire the Last One
Platform Engineering, Tuesday, October 6th, 2026
Legacy platform sprawl survives on tribal knowledge AI agents lack, so teams should make decommissioning part of 'done.'
PlatformEngineering.com observes that enterprises often run several generations of deployment platforms at once, such as a script-based setup for billing, a half-finished container migration and a new golden path, each with on-call staff.
Engineers navigate them using undocumented tribal knowledge, but AI coding agents only read what's written, turning legacy sprawl from an inconvenience into a correctness and reliability risk.
Platform teams should treat decommissioning as part of the definition of done, own the hard migrations and give legacy platforms real end dates.