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Code Generation and Maintenance at Scale: Morgante Pell
Takeaway
Large-scale code migrations need static analysis + semantic search + agentic execution — vanilla embedding RAG retrieves too much irrelevant code to be useful.
Summary
- Grit (founder Morgante Pell) targets the 90% of dev work that is modifying existing huge applications, not greenfield demos — claims more merged AI PRs than anyone
- Three-process pipeline: index codebase semantically + statically (deps graph), execute via LLM + sub-agents writing diffs guided by GQL queries, push PRs for human review
- GQL = custom query engine combining syntactic AST matches (e.g. logger(...) calls) with semantic embedding filters above a cosine-similarity threshold to find true logging calls vs UI alerts
- Real customer: migrated thousands of repos from logging to OpenTelemetry in a week using <100 dev hours + thousands of compute hours after years of stalled spreadsheet-driven attempts
- Philosophy: raise the ceiling for top 1% engineers (one driver coordinating many agents) rather than lower the floor for non-technical users; pure RAG embeddings fail for code-migration retrieval
code-generationstatic-analysismigration
Original description
AI agents show incredible promise, but have a hard time dealing with existing large-scale codebases. This talk will show examples of how LLMs fail when not given the proper tools and practical demonstrations of how pre-LLM tools already make developers superhuman. Explore a concrete set of challenges around user interfaces for AI and a vision for what superintelligent developer assistants might look like. Recorded live in San Francisco at the AI Engineer World's Fair. See the full schedule of talks at https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair/2024/schedule & join us at the AI Engineer World's Fair in 2025! Get your tickets today at https://ai.engineer/2025 About Morgante Morgante is the founder of Grit, a startup using static analysis and AI to automate common software development tasks with backing from Founders Fund. Before founding Grit, Morgante was a senior staff architect at Google, where he led the development of infrastructure automation tools and worked with dozens of F500 companies on software modernization projects. He is passionate about software architecture, programming languages, and going on long hikes.