Intel / article

Legacy System Modernization with Coding Agents: A Case Study

Source: arxiv.org
Author: Iago da Silva Rodrigues Alves, Cristiano Politowski, Jo\~ao Eduardo Montandon
Date: Published Sep 1, 2026

Context

A legacy-software migration study found that preserving behavior became substantially harder for complex features. Researchers used Anthropic's Claude Code to migrate 12 features from a business system written in Visual Basic 6 to C# .NET 10. They checked whether the new code preserved business rules and produced matching database records. Reported equivalence was 92% for low-complexity features and 47% for high-complexity ones. Each migration used a single session without corrective human feedback between iterations. The result identifies where this particular migration strategy left the most behavior unrecovered. Method and results.

Terms in this piece · Glossary

AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
token — The chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.

Read the source arxiv.org