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Tue, April 27AI-Assisted Software EngineeringBackend Engineering & RuntimesArchitecture & Distributed Systems
Every organisation has them: the Java 8 services nobody wants to touch, the .NET Framework applications quietly holding up a business process, and the dependency upgrades that keep slipping to next quarter. AI coding tools promise to make modernisation more affordable, but only if they are applied to the right parts of the job.
In this session, you will explore how to use AI across a modernisation effort, from deep assessments that establish what a codebase actually does before anything changes, to repeatable bulk refactoring, dependency upgrades, and migration planning for moves such as Java 8 to 21 and .NET Framework to .NET 8. You will also examine where to draw the line between AI and deterministic tooling: recipe-based transforms such as OpenRewrite can handle the mechanical bulk, while AI can assist with assessment, the long tail of edge cases, and explaining changes to the people reviewing them.
The session also examines the failure modes: changes that compile but quietly alter behaviour, upgrades that pass through a test suite too thin to detect problems, and “modernised” code that nobody on the team understands. You will leave with a repeatable approach for gaining the speed of AI without betting the system on it.
What You Will Learn
How to apply AI across assessment, refactoring, dependency upgrades, and migration planning
How to divide modernisation work between AI and deterministic tooling such as OpenRewrite
How to identify risks including behavioural changes, inadequate test coverage, and code that teams struggle to understand
How to structure a repeatable approach to AI-assisted legacy modernisation
Who Should Attend
Software Developers, Software Architects, Technical Leads, Platform Engineers, and practitioners responsible for modernising legacy Java, .NET, or other established codebases.
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Brent Laster is a global trainer, author, and speaker on open-source technologies, as well as an experienced developer, manager, and director. He is also the founder and president of Tech Skills Transformations, LLC – a company dedicated to making technology understandable and usable. Throughout his career in software development and management, Brent has always made time to learn and develop both technical and leadership skills and share them with others. He believes that regardless of the topic or technology, there’s no substitute for the excitement and sense of potential that come from providing others with the knowledge they need to accomplish their goals.
