AI Won’t Save Your Code Migration, But It Can Accelerate It

Large-scale code migrations fail due to scale, lost tribal knowledge, and lack of repeatable systems. Fully automated AI migrations are unrealistic given hallucinations and edge case blind spots. The practical approach is a human-in-the-loop model where AI acts as an accelerator, not a replacement. Aviator's Runbooks concept provides executable, versioned specifications that teams collaboratively refine, capturing edge cases and transformation rules so that knowledge compounds across future migrations rather than being rediscovered each time.