Whether an agency handed off the project or your only engineer quit, you now own a codebase nobody can explain. Start with evidence, not a rewrite.
Founders who inherited a codebase from a departed developer, freelancer, or agency and need to know what they actually have.
When a codebase has no tests, no documentation, and no one who remembers why anything was built, the next developer often quotes a rewrite — not because the code is unsalvageable, but because picking it up blind is harder than starting over. Most 'the last developer scammed us' stories are really this.
Before anyone proposes a rewrite, get the evidence: does anything have tests, where are the security and dependency findings, which areas changed most and broke most, and can the app even be deployed and rolled back today? That evidence separates 'messy but workable' from 'genuinely dangerous'.
Qualyn reads the inherited repo and produces an evidence-based picture of its health — no institutional knowledge required. Use it to brief a new developer, scope the real work, and challenge a rewrite quote with facts.
Qualyn reads the evidence teams already discuss and turns it into a release call that can be inspected before production.
Secure access first: repo, hosting, domains, and credentials in your name. Then gather evidence — test state, security findings, dependency health, deployability — before paying anyone for opinions. The evidence tells you whether you have a fixer-upper or a hazard.
Default to fixing unless the evidence says otherwise. Rewrites cost more and take longer than quoted, and they throw away working behavior nobody documented. A rewrite is justified by evidence of deep structural risk, not by a new developer's discomfort.
No tests, secrets committed to the repo, dependencies years out of date, no deploy or rollback path, and a history of huge unreviewed commits. Each one is findable from the repo's evidence without reading the code.
IP assignment in writing, repo and infrastructure access in your name, credentials transferred, documentation of how to deploy and roll back, and a walkthrough of known risks. Tie the final payment to the handover being complete.
Give them evidence instead of folklore: the current picture of the repo, its riskiest areas, its test and finding state, and the known unresolved risks. That turns weeks of cautious exploration into a prioritised starting list.
Yes. Qualyn works from the repository's own evidence — code, changes, tests, findings, and history — so it does not depend on documentation or the previous developer's availability.
Connect GitHub and turn release evidence into a clear answer: safe to ship, why, and what would change the answer.