Legacy Code Becomes Readable Overnight

Turn legacy into leverage: use AI to explain undocumented code, scope migrations, and reduce the cost of tackling technical debt.

Sep 29, 2025 0m 16s

Alan Buxton

Expert Insights

Alan Buxton emphasizes the utility of AI tools in making indecipherable legacy code interpretable and manageable. He states that AI can decode and comprehend such code, which traditionally causes significant issues due to poor documentation and the absence of the original authors.

Hear Alan explain:

How AI can demystify legacy code that might have been written a decade ago and seemingly impossible to understand.
The tangible value of asking an AI tool like Copilot about the functionality of a given code and getting a comprehensible response.
How this AI capability can potentially save significant time and resources that would have otherwise been spent on deciphering old, complex code.

You've got a piece of legacy code that someone wrote 10 years ago. Obviously there's no documentation, no one really understands it. You can, uh, ask, uh, you know, you can ask copilot, what is this code doing? And it will tell you roughly what it's doing.

— Alan Buxton, CTO, Simphony

THE NEW DEFAULT angle

Here's how teams can take advantage of artificial intelligence tools to make sense of older, poorly documented code:

Deploy AI assistance when diving into undocumented legacy code. Use AI-powered tools such as GitHub Copilot to decode and interpret the original functionality of such code.
Dedicate time to educating the team about how to effectively solicit AI for understanding complex code. This could take the form of workshops or guidelines.
Encourage developers to trust and value the AI tools' ability to interpret code, thus aiding their own understanding and boosting productivity.
Identify and catalogue key pieces of legacy code within your organization that could benefit from a 'decoding' session to help streamline future developments and reduce the time sunk into understanding old codebases.