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Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats

992: Migrating Legacy Code Just Got Easier

Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats

Wes Bos

Tech News, Technology, News

4.91.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2026

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Wes and Scott talk about migrating large codebases with AI — how to plan framework and language moves, establish patterns, handle templating changes, test thoroughly, safely deploy, and more. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 01:46 Why migrate to a new language or framework? 05:09 How to approach a large code migration 08:47 Establishing patterns before using AI 10:35 Moving from pug to JSX 12:06 Building a detailed migration plan 15:18 Testing every part of the application 15:51 Brought to you by Sentry.io 16:58 Deploying and catching issues with Sentry 19:12 Converting express requests to web standard requests 19:34 Other codebases that could benefit from AI migrations 21:36 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs Sick Picks Scott: WisprFlow Wes: displayplacer Shameless Plugs Phases Podcast Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to syntax. Today, we're talking about migrating and moving languages or frameworks, moving

0:05.6

your code to something else with the help of AI. How do you possibly even do that? You got a big

0:11.8

monolith application that's been sitting around for many, many years, and you've dreamt of moving

0:17.9

this thing over to something else. You simply cannot just type into the box, move it to X, Y, and Z, move it to a different language,

0:25.5

move it to a different framework.

0:27.0

It doesn't work that way, just yet at least.

0:30.6

But the cost of moving has never been lower with all of this stuff.

0:34.0

So I recently moved my own course platform over from, it was on Express for

0:39.2

probably 10 years, maybe 12, and I moved it. I finally moved it over to Hano, and then I also moved

0:45.0

a whole bunch of other stuff at the same time. And we're going to explain, like, what the

0:50.8

approach is to moving something like this over, which seems like maybe a bit of a daunting move and how to get into it, how to test it, how to plan for it, all that good stuff. Let's get on into it. My name is Wes with me. Scott, how you doing? I'm too good, man, chill in. I'm not sick. I'm not hurt. I am a rare. A rare Scott win. Yeah. Wait, ma'am. When you got,

1:14.0

when you got little kids, you're an action junkie like me. It's easy to dive into any of those

1:19.3

things. No, I'm ready to hear about this. I do do a number of these things migrating things.

1:24.5

I migrated an app from Tori to Electron. It went great. So I think this is a

1:29.2

perfect use case for AI as long as you keep a handle on how things are. It's a probably a very,

1:36.6

probably one of the best use cases of AI that I can think of is like it's very deterministic.

1:42.1

It can be very, it tested very well, but certainly a lot can go wrong.

1:46.5

So let me explain it. So I have a course platform, which I sell courses on, I have free courses

1:52.1

on. There's, I think, 10 or so different marketing websites that are on it. There's a whole

1:57.4

administration area. There is a whole viewing experience. There's stats. There's an admin area. There's there's roles and all. There's, you know, like, there's everything you'd expect from like a course platform. And I've been, been building this thing for many, many years. And I've kept the stack relatively the same.

2:19.9

I've upgraded lots of stuff over the years, but the one piece that was sort of the backbone of it

2:23.7

was it used ExpressJS as the controller,

...

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