Let’s be honest: rewriting legacy systems sucks.
It’s expensive. It’s slow. It’s risky. And it often fails.
At NanoAPI, we’re building a new way forward—one that lets you evolve your system by extracting functionality instead of rewriting everything from scratch. Our goal is to help teams innovate, scale, and adapt without the weight of technical debt dragging them down.
Because legacy systems shouldn’t be anchors - they should be launchpads.
2. Why Is This a Problem?
Most modern software systems weren’t designed—they evolved. Over time, teams change, frameworks become outdated, and business logic sprawls across thousands of lines of code.
The result? Monoliths that no one fully understands. You touch one thing and something else breaks. A single function call could be trivial—or it could power your entire payments pipeline. Good luck figuring out which.
This complexity kills velocity. It paralyzes decision-making. And for leadership, it’s nearly impossible to assess what parts of the system are fragile, valuable, or safe to change.
3. How Do People Solve This Today?
There are two dominant approaches on the market today, and both are painful:
Rewrite Everything (a.k.a. "The Big Rewrite")
Tools like Claudia.js or the Modular Monolith pattern encourage extraction though rebuilding around modern paradigms (e.g. serverless), but this typically demands a full migration and deep re-architecting. Even if it starts small, it spirals into years of work. Rewrites introduce regressions, delay product roadmaps, and often stall out before delivering value. A middle-ground approach often used here is the manually-driven Strangler Pattern, which still requires years of effort.Apply AI to Understand Codebases
The promise is tempting: use LLMs to analyze your code and tell you what’s important-or even better, rewrite the whole damn thing for you. But there’s a catch—context windows are too small for real-world monoliths. AI tools may hallucinate, struggle to maintain consistency across files, and miss deeper structural relationships. You end up with surface-level insights, not surgical extractions.
Both options feel like hacking through a jungle with a butter knife.
4. NanoAPI's Solution – Symbol Extraction
At NanoAPI, we believe the right abstraction layer is the symbol.
We built a platform that helps teams extract critical functionality from legacy codebases by analyzing symbols—functions, classes, and variables—mapped into an architectural graph.
This process, which we call symbol extraction, lets you isolate self-contained pieces of your system, see how they depend on each other, and surgically extract or modularize them with confidence.
No rewrites. No guesswork. Just precision tooling for technical debt.
5. What Are Symbols?
In software, a symbol is any named element in your code: a function, class, variable, or module. These are the building blocks of your system’s logic.
Think of them like DNA for your application. Each symbol contains business logic, and together they form complex, interdependent behavior.
By analyzing symbols and how they reference each other, we can reconstruct a living architecture of your codebase—one that’s often more accurate than documentation or diagrams ever were.
6. What Is the Benefit of This Approach Over Other Tools?
Symbol extraction has several key advantages over conventional methods:
- It’s deterministic. We don’t guess. We analyze. Our system maps your code’s actual behavior, not just inferred patterns.
- No need to rewrite. Our tool is integrated in 5 minutes: instead of migrating everything over years, you selectively extract what matters right away.
- Architecture lives in code. Forget stale diagrams—your architecture becomes queryable, visual, and up-to-date.
- Safe, modular extraction. You can break down a monolith into clean components without introducing regressions.
- Clarity at scale. From a single function to a sprawling app, you get an interactive map of what your code is doing and why.
This is not just code transformation—it’s code as architecture.
7. What Are the Outcomes for Teams and Tech Leadership?
For engineering teams, NanoAPI means:
- Understanding dependencies instantly
- Knowing what’s safe to extract and what’s tightly coupled
- Preserving core logic while shedding dead weight
- Making real progress on tech debt without fear
For tech leadership, it means:
- Accelerating innovation without rewriting from scratch
- Unlocking architectural visibility across teams and services
- Bridging the gap between today’s monoliths and tomorrow’s modular systems
- Making informed decisions on investment, risk, and scaling
As companies shift toward serverless or modular monolith architectures, NanoAPI becomes the evolution engine—not a rip-and-replace tool, but a precision scalpel.
8. How You Can Help
We’re building NanoAPI in the open—with engineers, architects, and teams like yours in mind.
Here’s how you can get involved:
- Try our open-source tool and give us feedback: github.com/nanoapi-io/napi
- Join the community on Discord
- Contribute use cases or PRs
- Talk to us about using NanoAPI in your migration or modernization efforts
Together, we can turn legacy systems from roadblocks into runways—and bring architecture in line with reality.
Want More Information or Help Get Involved?
If you’re facing architectural bottlenecks, uncertainty in legacy systems, or need help guiding technical transformation, NanoAPI can help.
We’d love your feedback, ideas, and contributions.
- 🌐 nanoapi.io
- 🔍 docs.nanoapi.io - Our documentation
- 🐙 GitHub Repo — star us ⭐
- 📬 Reach out via email — we’re always happy to connect
- 👾 Join our Discord community!
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