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SUMMARY:2 Million Dollars' worth of code for $20\,000: Rewriting large soft
	ware projects with AI agents
DTSTAMP:20260513T113354Z
DTSTART:20260522T141000Z
DESCRIPTION:Description:\nScanCode is the open-source industry standard for
	 scanning software for licenses and copyrights – a substantial real-world 
	system with more than 60\,000 lines of Python behind it. Conventional wisd
	om says rewriting something like that would take a team of engineers and a
	 seven-figure budget. Dr. Maxim Stykow and Dr. Adrian Braemer wanted to fi
	nd out how far $20\,000\, three weeks\, and a swarm of AI agents could rea
	lly get them.\n\nThis is their war story. They first attempted the rewrite
	 in February 2025\, when coding agents were still new. It was promising\, 
	but too supervision-heavy to be practical\, so they shelved it. Then in ea
	rly 2026\, the picture changed: Better models\, better harnesses\, and bet
	ter workflows made it possible to push agents much further on long-running
	 engineering tasks.\n\nMaxim and Adrian will share the gritty details: the
	 mix of third-party frontier models and open-weight models running on TNG’
	s own Skainet infrastructure. The dramatic quality gap between models – wh
	ere stronger ones solved in minutes what weaker ones failed at for hours. 
	The point where an agent introduced thousands of tests and slowed iteratio
	n to a crawl\, forcing them to teach it to optimize its own feedback loop 
	before continuing. Progress lost to accidental git resets. Orchestrator ag
	ents forgetting about their own subagents and fighting themselves. The “on
	e more prompt” addiction. And the surprising power of AGENTS.md\, living d
	ocumentation\, and tight feedback loops with custom linters and tests.\n\n
	Whether you care about large software rewrites\, autonomous coding\, or si
	mply getting more leverage as a developer\, this talk is a practical field
	 report from the current frontier of agentic engineering – what worked\, w
	hat didn’t\, and what’s coming next.\n--------------------------------\n\n
	Speaker:\n- Dr. Maxim Stykow\n- Dr. Adrian Braemer\n\n--------------------
	------------\n\nTalk details:\n- Link to the Big Techday website: https://
	bigtechday.com/en/talks#1ckBbBfvwisPk3PzQoQneD\n
LOCATION:Kohlebunker I
DURATION:PT50M
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