Two engineers from Spotify gave a talk about "Honk," an AI coding agent they built to make the same change across thousands of their code repositories at once. The talk covers how they stopped the automated pull requests (proposed code changes waiting for approval) from piling up faster than anyone could review them.
None of this applies to you directly. You do not have thousands of repositories. You probably have one website, a payment processor, a booking tool and an email list. But the problem Spotify is solving is the same problem sitting quietly underneath your site, just at a different scale.
Here it is. Every website is built on other people's code. WordPress plugins, a theme, PHP, a payment library, whatever your booking system runs on. All of it gets updated by the people who made it, usually for security reasons. If nobody applies those updates on your end, the gap widens. After two or three years, updating becomes genuinely risky, because so much has changed at once that something is likely to break. That is when a business owner hears "we should probably rebuild it," and the number is larger than expected.
Spotify's answer is to make the update process constant and automatic so the gap never opens. Your answer does not need to be an AI agent. It needs to be somebody's job, on a schedule, with someone checking the site afterwards to confirm nothing broke.
The reason this story gets attention in engineering circles is the AI part. The reason it should interest you is the boring part underneath it: even a company with Spotify's resources found that letting code go stale was expensive enough to build a whole system to prevent it.
What to do
Ask whoever maintains your site two questions. When were the plugins, themes and underlying software last updated? And is there a set schedule, or does it only happen when something goes wrong? If the honest answer to the second one is "when something goes wrong," that is worth fixing before it becomes a rebuild conversation. It is a small monthly cost either way. It is only ever a large one if you leave it.
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