AI’s Big Leap: From Sidekick to Autonomous, Multi-repo Refactoring Powerhouse

Generative AI can be a powerful force multiplier for developers, but it also comes with limitations. Developers are expected to co-create with AI, and check the generated output, or risk hallucinations running wild. This can aid development at a local machine, but what happens when you try to apply these tools on a massive scale?

For mass-scale code operations, AI needs to have agency, able to operate with some degree of autonomy. In this session, we’ll cover how you can combine retrieval and tool calling techniques, the richest code data source for Java called the Lossless Semantic Tree (LST), and OpenRewrite rules-based recipes to drive more efficient and accurate AI model output for refactoring and analyzing large codebases.

You’ll learn about how you can use AI embeddings as a powerful tool to visualize, analyze, and even do smarter sampling for your codebase. Plus, we’ll show you how to leverage GenAI to accelerate writing OpenRewrite deterministic recipes.

We’ll take an honest look back and a look ahead on our process, to show you how enterprises can now reliably leverage AI for code modernization at scale.


About Justine Gehring

Justine Gehring is a talented researcher in the field of Machine Learning (ML) for code and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Her focus lies in generating code under challenging circumstances, specifically in scenarios such as sparse data where library-specific code is required, as well as managing a substantial amount of code at a time. Justine is a research engineer at Moderne.

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About Jonathan Schneider

Jonathan is co-founder and CEO at Miami-based Moderne which automates software maintenance activities at scale. He founded OpenRewrite at Netflix and went on to found the Micrometer project as a member of the Spring Team. Jonathan is the author of SRE with Java Microservices (OReilly). He is an Army veteran and two time bronze star recipient.

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About Sam Snyder

Sam Snyder has spent the past decade working on improving developer happiness with better tooling. At Tableau software, he used data from the development and deployment pipeline to systematically seize the greatest opportunities for improvement and eliminate the greatest pain points. At Gradle, he integrated that process and data visualization methodology into Gradle Enterprise. Now as VP of Engineering at Moderne, Sam leads development on the core refactoring technologies and teaches Moderne's customers how to automate away the tedious, repetitive parts of software development.

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