One Day, $1,000 in Tokens: An AI War Room for Legacy Code — Ford Prior, GEICO Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:01 [music] For the past couple years, feels like all we've been talking about is how to increase the velocity of our SDLC. Y'all know what I'm talking about. And specifically this big fat build chunk in the middle, okay? where we've been doing a lot of our coding and intellectual work. And sure enough, at least where I work, that step has basically been obliterated, right?

00:33 And we've reclaimed a bunch of time. But I think, and I'm no profit in imagining some future where agents are doing the work and humans are there in the middle as exe or uh as executives signing off on each stage. But I work at Geico and we're not a tech company. We're a riskmanagement company. And risk management is baked into everything that we do, including the way we develop and deliver software.

01:01 So while we've seen this inner loop speed up, to use Jean Kim's concept, we find ourselves seemingly stuck within the bounds of this outer loop, which is to say everything else that happens other than the coding in the building. [snorts] and we find ourselves wondering what life might be like outside of these walls in a world where the outer loop keeps pace with the inner loop.

01:25 So this is a story of how we broke free as it were and my intention with this talk is to empower you guys to do the same. Now when Geico manages America's fleet of automobiles or the risk therein and something happens on the road like an accident, we incur what we call loss. which is typically reported by one of our policy holders and it becomes a claim and claims technology is where the policy comes to life and gets the customer back on the road as quickly as possible with minimal disruption which we call a resolution.

02:03 And I'm I'm [snorts] Ford Prior. I'm a senior staff engineer and tech evangelist embedded in the claims tech group at GEICO. And I think I'm the only tech evangelist at Birkshshire Hathway. Basically what that means is within our 300 engineer group, we have like 32 pizza teams as we used to call them with a tech lead and counterpart for each business counterpart for each.

02:28 And my job is to find and implement best practices in our SDLC. I run a claims innovation lab and I share stories like this one to attract the best engineers in the world to our problem space which we find very interesting, not to mention important part of the American economy. So, a little bit more context on how we develop software. Um, as many organizations do, we conceive of our work in terms of semantic versioning.

02:55 And about 6 months ago, we looked at our backlogs and found that our engineers after they finished their latest patch or chase down the latest minor upgrade had only 25% on a good day or less of their bandwidth to dedicate towards the major changes that keep us competitive, a step ahead of the competition. That's like V1 to V2 to V3. So we began strategically investing in Geico managed AI agents on a variety of harnesses using a variety of models to offload that work all the way from spec to deployment for our patches

03:29 and minor work. um with the goal of redirecting or rerouting that work so that our engineers can stay our our brilliant engineers can stay focused on the stuff that matters and that they find most joyful which is to do the major work which again as I mentioned is key to our competitive edge. Okay, so this is current state. But as we look at this major work, we find ourselves rate limited by our ability to collaborate in rooms full of the right individuals summoned at the right time to make the right decisions at every

04:00 interval in whatever life cycle would need to happen in order to get get the major work to prod. And not only are we missing the ability to collaborate, but we're also missing this intelligence, this ability to weave together all the variables relevant to the problem space as we learn it and deepen our understanding of it, including the factecking, the code crunching, basically everything that needs to happen to serve up the insights as quickly as the decisions come up.

04:29 And that's what ultimately gives us the confidence to bring those major changes to market. Okay? So, it's collaboration and intelligence. We're missing both of those at the major change scale. So to solve for this, we created a multiplayer AI native war room and it consists of a roster of key decision makers and subject matter experts relevant to the topic, a driver to wield these expensive AI tools, and an AI native productivity suite um which includes our comms channels for all the chatter, an interactive design

04:58 studio. I can't mention the vendor names, but y'all can take a while guess um to uh for all of our our collaborative elements. And then obviously we have our code repositories and all of these are wired into a powerful combination of workflows, agent skills, MCPs, enterprise MCPs, um, and these agent fleets to do the heavy lifting, factchecking, synthesis, etc.

05:23 So my question was, how might we accelerate the delivery of agent callable APIs for our legacy core capabilities? [snorts] And for context, our legacy claim systems is like millions of lines of code. Okay, so um and the deep context that we're trying to build here um gets built once and then can be reused. So that's just some additional context, but my bet was that with $1,000 in hand of AI tokens in one day, we could map out one domain end to end, including like graph representations of the business topology, all the

05:56 complex code um in our legacy systems and everything in between. And we can have the agent find and propose one serious change um which in our case we scope down to an agent callable API into our legacy claim systems and have the whole thing deployed to our skills agent platform and running for a a demo to my boss at 4 p.m. So I put the pressure on myself.

06:26 Um but we ran this experiment three different times across three different code modernization missions. Um and this little taxonomy here uplift transform reimagine is from the anthropic code modernization plugin which I'll touch on in a minute. Um but the story is um that we first we looked at our rentals domain which is a relatively simple one. Um that is like all the tech behind getting you guys your rental cars when your your primary car gets in an accident.

06:50 and we implemented a newer version of the same tech which is again the definition of uplift and we extended an existing API. And in this case it was an interesting story because the agent used some uh interesting um uh process to find and distill data to figure out that we could connect a couple dots and save ourselves 8 and a half thousand calls per month by giving the customer up-to-date rental information.

07:17 Um so that was the first experiment that we ran. Um, and then the second one was transformation over damages domain. And damages is like arguably our most complex. No, sorry. Damages I'm reading from notes here. Um, damage domain is how we put dollar signs on a reported loss. And so for this case, we built in a set of new agent callable APIs to unlock a larger workflow that needed damages data.

07:43 [snorts] And then lastly, we reimagined our salvage domain, which is arguably the most complex of the three. um is basically everything that happens when your car is totaled. Um and in this case, we produced a fully vetted migration plan with API specs and design mockups ratified and this is the most important part green lit by product and tech at every level.

08:00 Okay, so there's like a fully vetted project plan that's ready to be implemented which is like as you guys know is like that's like a a milestone unto itself getting everybody on the same page um including the technical details. Um and honestly like in this case it understood the domains really well and um in this and the the story with the salvage work was that it found a prod bug.

08:19 I can't talk about more but it was shocking. Um so anyways uh you may be curious about kind of what like a little bit more detail into how this all worked. Um really like we had our friends at Anthropic who provided a bunch of stuff and then we had us that provided a lot of stuff. So on the left here we have >> [snorts] >> um the harness, the model, this thing called fleet kit which I'll explain in just a moment and this plugin that did code modernization tasks that's on the left brought by the vendor.

08:46 Okay, we could replace any of that by the way with another vendor, another model, another framework, etc. And on the right was the stuff that we can't replace. This is everything Geico. We need a ton of it. We had context in our knowledge base including software standards and all of this past decision archaeology. We had to do list of tools that the agent could access on my machine and instructions for the agents on how to use it.

09:09 We had the methods. I'm doing these out of order here, but we had methods which is essentially like all of our skills and all the the kind of the quirky domain specific highly optimized way that we develop software. Probably different from the way you guys do it. Um and then lastly judgment which is like who can decide what and at what gate, right? So both from the subject matter expert point of view and from the um the uh decision maker leadership point of view.

09:32 Um and um we group them into two repos and I'll explain why in a minute but that allowed us to ver allows us to have the agents add to it and correct it. Um and also humans do the same. Um but that AI and this is kind of one of the interesting parts uh is is expensive right to run at scale. And so we needed a fleet manager like a PhD level fleet manager.

09:53 And this was a bit of a collaboration with uh with Anthropic and it isn't open source yet, but I can share how it works today in hopes that you guys can construct your own version because it's not rocket science. So, Fleet Kit is this tight structured collection of rules, protocols, and instructions all written in Markdown, optimized for the clawed harness, specifically Fable, and designed around the core task of architecture transformation.

10:16 Um, and as you guys can kind of guess, like this type of thing doesn't really work with some of the previous iterations of models. I think like Opus 48 and beyond I I I would I would guess is like something that could handle this type of like uh steering um because it's like one level above um the actual system prompting, right? This is like rules that it has to follow, the agent has to follow.

10:38 Um and um it's pretty simple. takes a goal, breaks it down, dispatches leaders to do all the research and decide about the approach. It puts everything into this like human in the loop queue. You could use GitHub issues for example, something that the humans can comment on and approve or that other agents can add more context to. And then when everything looks tight from a approval standpoint, it dispatches builders to do the rest.

11:02 And in this case, we use beads. I'm not sure if you all know about beads, but beads kind of helps the agents keep track of everything um within their own agent space. Um and um ultimately the goal is to produce what we call a material change which is like a a change request into our systems or a code change into our code repositories. And the ultimate like idea with this though is that like developing software looks less like playing in a canvas and more like working in a factory.

11:28 Um okay I need to go faster. U so ultimately on the left here you see these three repositories that contain everything that Fleekit needs to run including the Fleekit source. Um, and by the way, all these slides are available on the blog post that I'll link at the very end. I can't tell with these lights who's taking pictures, but I just want to let youall know that if you want to look at the uh the visualizations that I'm showing here, they're all in a blog post that was released today, and I link it at the end of the

11:54 slides. So, anyway, um, so all this boots up, gets pulled into a claw cloud code session with a plugin, gets invoked, and you give it a mission, it adopts or creates a Slack channel, um, or in our comm's platform. And um and then that's that that that that mission channel is where everyone communicates. All the war room members, the people are relevant to the decisions and the project are invited.

12:14 And um every time the agent reaches a milestone um as it follows its ninestep process, it creates one of two artifacts. Um and by the way, on the right there where it says war room, that's where it like it can ping individual people based on the roster. So for example, if it's missing missing some product details, it'll figure out who owns that from a product perspective and mention that individual person.

12:36 Um, but other than that, it creates these worksheets that are like actually really well done HTML using cloud artifacts. People can fill them out. They're automatically saved. Um, and that's to fill the gaps. And it also creates design documents including like these like complex visualizations of our architecture that didn't exist before. Um, and that teams were delighted to get because they kept them afterwards.

12:56 Um, that we can then edit and then the agent can then reread our edited like a design document like a draw io or Figma. And then all that gets that sl all that gets slurped back up into the the um the session. Okay. Um and if you had stumbled into our war room in Richmond, [snorts] Virginia, which is where I'm from, um uh this summer, you would have seen either a big clawed code screen um with a bunch of people huddled around it or one of these two screens here.

13:23 On the left is like a product worksheet that we had to fill out and on the right um there it's like one of our our diagramming tools. And so like the big gist with this and the thing that was so delightful for me is that these were really highquality artifacts. So there wasn't like ever a question of like why is the agent asking me dumb questions. It was like wow that's actually a great question that we've never thought about identifying an edge case either in the business or with the technology.

13:49 Um and then the design artifacts like I said the teams could keep them afterwards and oftentimes they were mapping stuff that just no one had taken the time to do because as you as you all know not every engineer loves doing diagrams. Okay, I'm skipping stuff here, but we're going to keep moving because I got like three minutes. Um, these war room tools, um, just really simply, uh, basically there's two types of agents, the code dives that we called them, um, where it did lots of code crunching and graphing of our of

14:13 our legacy legacy domain specific languages. Um, that happened in the cloud and then we had local agents running that had access to all of my laptop, my all the MCPs on my laptop. uh many of which were not in production yet enterprise specific highly optimized for our problem space um and that could surface really valuable data including like chunked versions of the code bases that were being dived.

14:36 So um there there's a bindings file that I gave the agent to basically describe what's on my machine, how it works and how to map it to the fleet kit work. Um, and you can see the built-ins, MCP servers, the really quick the code modernization plugin. Um, this is at the heart of the whole thing and what's inside of it. Uh, I think, uh, you guys will find somewhat interesting.

14:59 Um, and I would encourage you to to look into it after the fact after this presentation to get more information. Um, and I'm going to I'm going to keep moving here. Um, ultimately the driver's laptop, my laptop was the runtime. Okay? So, I had to run nine steps that are that are um, started with the booting step. So, eight steps after that. And what I want youall to take from this super busy slide is that on the left here, those were all steps forked from the code mod plugin.

15:25 Okay? So, we adapted it to our needs as I would encourage anyone to do. And on the right, those orange colored elements are worksheets that were created. So, that was going to require human approval. And so as we did this like modernization journey, you can see how there's a lot of human input in the beginning, less on the on the end, and how the core of it was this code modernization plugin.

15:47 And just an interesting detail, and this is something that the code modernization plug-in does is it does like a deterministic analysis of like did the previous step create the artifacts that it needed to including a file. So, some interesting lessons. Um, obviously I burned a lot of uh burned a lot to [laughter] um and um one just as a little takeaway, do not let uh Claude running fable set up crowns to check on work uh because you'll he'll launch a claw a fable session each time and burn your budget immediately.

16:17 Um but um some other interesting takeaways we had were relevant to prompt caching um which was way higher than I thought it would be and then some quirky sub aent behavior. But one of the interesting things was is like after we did all the context building and had these agents dispatch to like write our complex legacy code, we ran benchmarks um against like using our existing code recently written as the golden data and found out that Fable Sonnet 55 wrote it just as good as if not better than Fable.

16:45 So um model selection for the win. Um and then looking forward um I think you know uh enhanced gate enforcement is going to be the biggest win that we have um in my mind at least. Um we also have some interesting updates to make with decision models within our harness um and within the our model selection harness framework. And then um our our like our context was just like markdown files, y'all.

17:10 Like we didn't really have an complex way to graph things out. like we weren't using anything fancy with a um like um like graphify or um Obsidian. I mean any of these I mean honestly if you guys find me afterwards I'd love your input on this but like a more optimized way to do search and uh and look at all that context that we're using to inform this war room.

17:30 And then lastly um audio is a data source. like I want to turn a recorder on and have these conversations we have like automatically transcribed, but I had to like instead sit there and furiously write down all the notes that were happening during these meetings. Um, and so that was kind of like a distracting thing that I think and I'm sure I lost a bunch.

17:47 Um, so a less lossy way to incorporate the um, inputs from the war room. And then lastly, how can we deploy this thing across the organization? Um, y'all find some group in your organization that doesn't know how to make decisions. deploy this, drive it, control the cost, make it yours. And at GEICO, we're like trying to figure out how as these agents are hill climbing and figuring out better ways to do things.

18:10 Where can we put humans in the loop and right, how can we like put our best, brightest engineers who are receiving genius, divine intervention, as it were, and have them pick the next hill as the agents climb the first one. All right, and that is it. Um, we broke free of our att. [laughter] And that's the blog that you guys can take a picture of, um, if you'd like. All right. Thanks for your time. [applause]