# OpenRewrite

7 Hacker News commenters recommended OpenRewrite and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free tool that rewrites source code to modernize it while staying close to the surrounding code. Common caveat: build plugins keep everything in memory and reparse on each change.

## Why people recommend it

- Modernizes code, keeps surrounding code intact (2 comments): "it produced the best results for code transformations with the highest fidelity to the surrounding code" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46995411)) "tooling that can modify your source code to make it more modern is really cool stuff" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050885))

## What people warn about

- Build plugins reparse everything on change (1 comments): "OpenRewrite's build plugins, on the other hand, store everything in memory and need to be reparsed every time there is a change." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47100578))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Coccinelle](https://hackerapproved.com/p/coccinelle.md): 7 recommend
- [go fix](https://hackerapproved.com/p/go-fix.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "OpenRewrite", https://hackerapproved.com/p/openrewrite/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).