Why 'rip it up and start again' works for home renovations and AI adoption: David Richards
An AI consultant told Axios last month that a client of theirs had run up half a billion dollars on Anthropic’s Claude in a single month. Five hundred million.
It has rattled boardrooms, and it sits beside harder facts. Microsoft has been cancelling most of its Claude Code licences. Uber said it had burned through its 2026 AI budget by April. Amazon has just scrapped an internal leaderboard that ranked staff by tokens burned, a game that rewarded activity over output. The worry doing the rounds is blunt. Nobody seems sure what this stuff costs.
Here is what the panic misses. Bills like that rarely come from clever work. They come from pointing a powerful tool at a hopeless job. And the most hopeless job in software is renovating the old.
A few years ago we rebuilt a house in California, and we did it in two halves. For the first, we tried to work with what was already there. We worked out where the plumbing ran, traced the wiring, knocked down walls and moved others, and found a fresh surprise behind every one. It ran badly over budget and far over time.
For the second half, the other side of the house, we stopped being sentimental. We knocked it down in a day. Most Californian homes are timber-framed because wood flexes, which matters when the San Andreas runs through your county. Lightly built comes down fast and goes up fast. The second half cost a fraction of the first and was finished in a fraction of the time.
Software is no different. Legacy code is a house nobody kept the plans for. Twenty years of decisions, fixes and shortcuts, most undocumented, all of them load-bearing in ways you discover only when something collapses. Ask AI to refactor it and the machine must first read the whole tangle, hold it in its head and tiptoe through dependencies it cannot fully see.
It is slow. It is dear. And it still breaks the thing on the far side of the building that nobody remembered was wired in. That is how your half a billion disappears.
Ask the same machine to build afresh and everything changes. It lays out a clean structure it understands, because it wrote it. It knows where each part sits. Work that would have meant weeks of archaeology takes an afternoon.
I have seen it close up. Not long ago someone on our team sat down with a would-be founder for a single conversation. We recorded the meeting, fed the transcript into Claude, and got back a business plan. Then we passed the plan to Claude Code, which produced a working prototype and a website.
From the end of the meeting to something a customer could click on took about an hour. A year of my early Silicon Valley life, compressed into a lunch break.
This is not a rule for every case. Some old systems carry knowledge no one ever wrote down, and some must not be touched at all. But the instinct to preserve, to patch and prop up the thing you already own, is more often than not the costly mistake.
Orange Juice had it right in 1983. The only top ten the Glasgow band ever managed told you exactly what to do with the thing that no longer works. Rip it up and start again.
So this Friday morning, before you approve another budget to nurse a system built for a vanished age, ask the harder question. Are you renovating, or are you simply afraid to let go?
David Richards MBE is managing partner of Yorkshire AI Labs