Codemods at Scale — Changing Ten Thousand Call Sites Before Lunch
Every large codebase carries changes everyone wants and no one will do: the deprecated API with ten thousand call sites, the formatting standard half-adopted, the pattern that post-dates most of the code. By hand they're quarter-long projects that die in review; as codemods — programs that rewrite programs — they're an afternoon of transform engineering and an overnight run. The capability compounds: an organization that can safely change everything everywhere stops being afraid of its own codebase.
Codemods are programs that rewrite programs: AST-based (semantic targeting, idempotent, format-preserving), honest about their residue. Landing is logistics — ownership-sharded PR fleets, review the transform plus sampled output, lint rules closing the door. The product is reversibility at codebase scale.