The Call That Started Everything
The client's CTO opened the call with a concrete problem: their prescription processing system was failing on roughly 40% of real-world inputs, routed to a manual review queue that had become load-bearing infrastructure. The developer who had built the original system had left 18 months ago. A mobile app integration was due in 90 days.
We asked to see the codebase before saying anything else.
What we found was a system built on a reasonable 2019 commercial OCR library, surrounded by years of conditional logic that had accumulated without any of it being documented. Each addition had made sense at the time - a fix for handwritten abbreviations, a workaround for a specific clinic's prescription format, a retry loop for low-confidence scans. Taken together, they had created something no current team member could reason about in full.
The 40% failure rate was not a sign the original system was poorly designed. It was a sign the system had drifted far enough from its original design assumptions that it needed to be replaced.
