Ed Grosvenor
On Artisan Beer
“Just about any app that you get your hands on is going to be like 30% active code and 70% dead code, and it's all just still there.”
Artisan Beer · AI Builders · November 2026
Context
Ed had added logging to a client's 15-year-old CRM to find which code paths are actually live before rebuilding it. He says teams almost never did this before AI, even though they should have.
Transcript
…thing, there's some margin for error. If I get some of this stuff wrong, it's not the end of the world, so I'm not going to actually break anything. But I don't want to spend all of this time and attention and tokens reading all of the code. I want to read the code that's likely actually in use.
Yeah.
So I learned a lot about tombstoning and, you know, how because that always used to be a really tedious thing that we would almost never do. We should have done a lot more often back in the pre-AI days, but most teams didn't do it. So just about any app that you get your hands on is going to be like 30% active code and 70% dead code, and it's all just still there. And you're still running 10 lines and code.
It so reminds me of my last client. But so my last technical client that I had. It's interesting also, like, remember when we were talking about, so I'm, so I'm building Sputnik, right? Sputnikintelligence.com. It's very good. For podcast newsletter data for your agents. And so I built this thing…
Yeah. So this to loop briefly back to the CRM project, another thing that the requirements document had was just a bunch of really like difficult to write reporting.
Difficult reporting.
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