AI makes it completely defensible these days, as long as you have some "dev intuition".

Example: Someone just handed me a USB key with some old DOS software on it called SAGE made by a company which disappeared in 2011 (which apparently still powers a number of law offices... shocker), and they encountered a date handling issue (any case entered for 2026 borks some views and reports) and I'm facing either a decompilation or some other heavy analysis (none of which I'm familiar with) since the source code is obviously unobtainable (score another for open source? Seriously, when companies sink, they should be required to release their source code...). I'm not doing this for free, of course (I did tell them that failure was a distinct possibility), but I'm going to attack it with AI and rely on dev intuition for the rest and see what happens... (and use some kind of test harness, of course... to prevent regressions and prove the fixes)