The Archaeologist’s Copilot
4.00T1 sourcemartinfowler.com (Exploring Gen AI series, incl. Böckeler)
Source record
Published by martinfowler.com (Exploring Gen AI series, incl. Böckeler) (T1 source). The original is at https://martinfowler.com/articles/archaeologist-copilot.html.
Pipeline notes
The summary and note below are generated by the signal pipeline — they are Beyond Desk’s reading, not quotations from the source.
SummaryArticle describes modernizing a 20-year-old Java 1.5 codebase using AI assistance combined with stable Docker environments, test-guided incremental refactoring, and evidence-grounded prompts. Early LLM attempts produced plausible but incorrect results; success came from constraining AI with codebase evidence and a step-by-step strategy.
Why it mattersConcrete anti-patterns and a disciplined workflow for using LLMs on legacy code, drawn from a real modernization project rather than theory.
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