Large Repo Maintenance and Migrations in the Era of AI Agents

'Gradient Descending' is a series of roundtables on AI: curated deep dives with technical builders. Past roundtables discussions covered RL Environments, Evals, Fine-Tuning, Agent Frameworks, Open Source Models, and Knowledge Graphs with companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Scale AI and many more. For our next session, we’re joined by Stoyan Nikolov (Principal Software Engineer - Developer AI at Google) for a discussion on Large Repo Maintenance and Migrations in the Era of AI Agents. As AI coding assistants become part of everyday software development, engineering teams are beginning to rethink how large codebases are maintained and evolved. We’ll explore how AI agents are changing repository-scale development, what it takes to execute large migrations safely, where current approaches break down, and the emerging patterns for managing complex engineering systems at scale. Drawing on recent research and practical experience, Stoyan will share insights into repository-scale reasoning, AI-assisted code transformations, evaluation, and the challenges of moving from promising demos to production-ready developer workflows. Agenda: Arrivals: 09:00–09:30Roundtable discussion: 09:30–10:30 See past roundtables here:https://www.akashbajwa.co/t/ai-roundtables I agree that photographs and/or video may be taken during the event and used by the hosts on social media and in future promotional materials.