A startup that spent 18 months building its product is throwing away all that code and starting over. Autonoma, which has pivoted four times already, recently raised funding from a major industry player and hired 14 people, but decided a complete rewrite was necessary.

The decision came after the company experienced severe technical debt from its no-tests approach. Initially, skipping tests and using loose TypeScript worked when only two people wrote code. But as the team grew, bugs proliferated, the codebase became a mess of nulls and undefined behavior, and they even lost a client due to quality issues. The founder admits this was a mistake and now requires strict TypeScript and comprehensive testing from day one.

The rewrite isn't just about cleaning up technical debt. The team discovered that advances in AI models have made their sophisticated inspection systems obsolete. Their original agentic solution required complex guardrails and inspection code that's no longer necessary. Combined with their dissatisfaction with Next.js Server Actions - which they found had security issues, poor observability, and problematic async behavior - they decided to rebuild everything with modern practices and better technology choices.