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ainativedev/latest-aidevcon-speakers-london-2026

AI Native DevCon 2026 London — all conference sessions as interactive skills

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quotes.mdtalk-roberts-brownfield-ai-native/

Notable verbatim quotes

#QuoteTopicSection
1"we can all move a lot faster. Except not all of us can because in the brownfield, the reality is very different."Greenfield ↔ brownfield gap§ 4–5
2"[Brownfield] code bases. Account for an estimated 60 to 70% of enterprise software."Brownfield prevalence§ 5
3"Have you ever worked on a code base where something was developed by somebody who's long left the organization? And really the only documentation was in their head and they meant to write it down before they left."Tribal knowledge§ 5
4"every decision on this code base was made with the best possible intentions. Nobody wants the code to get like this."Empathy for legacy§ 5
5"I don't think of brownfield code bases as a ball of mud though. I think of them much more like a [city]."City metaphor§ 6
6"the developers who are working on it start to become kind of tourist[s]. They never learn about the inline problems of the code base."Pseudo-greenfield risk§ 8
7"the strangle[r] [fi]g pattern takes away the responsibility from the old area of co[de] one slice at a time"Strangler fig§ 9
8"There's an awful lot of half [strang]l[ed] patterns out there… you're then left with the double maintenance headache"Strangler fig failure mode§ 9
9"if you imagine a body right and you had to replace a kidney. If you go in there and you slice it and you remove the kidney and replace the kidney it's much more like that sort of methodology. What [a] horrible metaphor."Branch by abstraction metaphor§ 10
10"It's tempting to think that you could just let AI loose on your code but AI will confidently hallucinate about your code."AI risk§ 11
11"as soon as I got given access to cursor first thing I did was like oh I wonder if I can refactor everything. I did not push anything to the code base because I saw the sort of mess it was making."First-person AI cautionary tale§ 11
12"as Don said in the previous talk what you need is safety safety safety."Safety mantra§ 11
13"your developers are excellent eyewitnesses"Crime-scene framing§ 12
14"we found that when we had that data that people would look at it [— it] wasn't written by. The cleverest person on the team. It was written by AI. So… more people were willing to put in a view"AI as objectivity unlock§ 14
15"It also helped to break the bike [shed]ing bottleneck."Bike-shedding§ 14
16"we have rules that make sure that our skills don't repeat bad patterns that we have in the code base."Skill rules§ 15
17"six months worth of scope was shipped in eight weeks"Pseudo-greenfield case study headline§ 16
18"this sounds really simple but all we wanted to do was update the version of [AG g]ri[d]… [the first upgrade] took us… about a month."AG Grid case study§ 17
19"in a brown field it's often let's all just dive in and just get this done mentality and that can mean that the planning stage is forgotten."Planning gap§ 17
20"start with a [path] not migration… [Spec]s be the contract… Thin[] slices and not rewrites… complexity is the opportunity."Four practical takeaways§ 20
21"we slice it at the epic level… instead of being like four or five people we can now do that with one or two people"Q&A — team slicing§ 21

talk-roberts-brownfield-ai-native

outline.md

quotes.md

SKILL.md

transcript.md

README.md

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