Maja Wichrowska is a software engineer on the web infrastructure team at Notion, where she thinks about web performance and client frameworks. Prior to Notion, she championed the formation of a web infrastructure team at Airtable, and spent many years working as the tech lead of Airbnb’s Design Language System on the web. In her spare time, she loves traveling, playing rugby, and going on long walks with her Australian Shepherd.
Codemods in the Era of AI
07 Dec 2024
16:30
It’s 2024, your startup is growing, and you’re still using Javascript patterns from six (8? 12?) years ago. What do you do? You could do nothing—engineers are already leveraging modern best practices in new code and eventually, the legacy code will disappear on its own. You could shut down feature development—if the entire engineering organization is working together, maybe you could complete the code migration in just a few weeks. You could also leverage any number of AI tools that have cropped up to rewrite your code en masse—perhaps these tools could empower a single engineer to do the entire migration. These were the options we were weighing when faced with the task of converting hundreds of React class components to functional components at the end of last year. It was urgent enough to prioritize now, not quite urgent enough to stop other feature development, and too custom and potentially risky for an out-of-the-box AI tool. With two engineers, we converted nearly 70% of our components and dramatically simplified the remaining components with a more primitive tool—the humble codemod. This talk explores the role of codemods, AI, and manual intervention in code migrations in 2024.