Nobody understands your system. In two weeks, it will be written down.

Because the from-scratch rewrite is the best-documented failure in this industry — Netscape being the canonical case. The failure was never weak engineers; it was throwing away years of accumulated behavior, bug fixes included, that nobody had written down. The blueprint and its behavior suite are precisely what rewrites always lacked. Once behavior is written down and executable, replacement can move as fast as you like — the proof travels with it.

It is your system. Reverse engineering here means making explicit what you already own: reading your code, tracing your system’s behavior, and writing it down. Nothing leaves your control, and nothing changes in the first two weeks. The agents read while the system keeps running untouched.

If a machine can read it and a person once wrote it, our agents can work through it. Old dialects, no documentation, one contractor who answers emails sometimes — that is the normal case for this sprint, not the exception. What determines the fixed price is size and access, which is exactly what the first call checks.

Three things. The blueprint verifies — behavior suite green against your live system, quirks confirmed by your people — or you pay nothing. If verification slips for reasons on our side, we keep working at our cost for up to two more weeks first. And if a system is not a fit for a two-week blueprint, we say so on the first call instead of taking the fee and discovering it in week two. In the modernization phase, every milestone is paid on acceptance, proven against the behavior suite.

Two to four hours of interviews total, spread across the people who know the system, plus two review sessions. The heaviest single block is shorter than the meeting where you would otherwise argue about whether to rewrite.

No — that is deliberate. The blueprint is vendor-neutral by construction, and it pays for itself either way: take it to your own team, or put it in front of other vendors and compare quotes that are finally comparable. If the modernization happens with us, it is fixed-price milestones from the decision map, each paid on acceptance. The audit that can only conclude “build with us” is not an audit; the blueprint that can only lead to us would not be a blueprint.

No, and that is the point of the decision map. Some components should be encapsulated and left alone; some should go; some carry regulatory weight and need staged replacement. We are not structurally incentivized to sell you a rewrite — the sprint’s deliverable is understanding, and “leave it alone” is a legitimate finding we will hand you in writing.

Because the deliverable is bounded: read, trace, verify, write down. Our agents do the reading at machine speed and a senior engineer owns the verification, so we can size the work honestly — the same reason the guarantee exists at all. You cannot honestly guarantee an open-ended engagement; you can guarantee a bounded one. Modernization milestones are priced the moment the blueprint makes them sizeable, and each is fixed before it starts.