You're staring at a service nobody wants to own, a feature request depends on it, and someone still wants a release by Friday. That's the refactoring legacy code world. The temptation is to call it cleanup, then hope the code behaves while everyone keeps...
Your team has a prototype. It can answer questions, call a tool, and impress people in a demo. Then the substantial work begins. The prompt changes in staging but nobody knows why production behaves differently. Costs drift upward. A support workflow works for one...
