Generative AI can be incredibly powerful when it comes to legacy modernization. Not only can it help us better understand a large, aging codebase, it can even help us reverse engineer a legacy system when we don't have access to the complete source code. Doing it, though, requires a specific approach that's being described as 'context engineering'.

This is something we've been exploring a lot in recent months at Thoughtworks. On this episode of the Technology Podcast, Thoughtworks' lead for AI-enabled software engineering, Birgitta Böckeler, and tech principal Chandirasekar Thiagarajan join hosts Ken Mugrage and Neal Ford to discuss how it works.

They explain the process, the tools and what the work taught them about both generative AI and legacy modernization.

Read Birgitta's blog post on reverse engineering with AI: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/generative-ai/blackbox-reverse-engineering-ai-rebuild-application-without-accessing-code

How should businesses go about actually navigating AI? It's one thing to strategize and generate new ideas, but what needs to be done to put it into practice in a way that's effective and commercially impactful?

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, new host Nigel Dalton is joined by his Thoughtworks colleague May Xu — Head of Tech for Thoughtworks APAC — and Simon Noonan, CTO at Australian business software company MYOB.

Thoughtworks has been working closely with MYOB for a number of years now; May and Simon explain how they collaborate and offer their perspectives on everything from leadership to architecture in a world where AI has become imperative.

Learn more about Thoughtworks' partnership with MYOB: https://www.thoughtworks.com/clients/myob

In an age of vibe coding and LLMs, do we really need to care about documentation? Do we need to spend time and energy producing it — time when we could just be shipping code? Of course we do; particularly if we want to communicate and share software with other humans.

To discuss documentation in 2025, Technology Podcast host Lilly Ryan is joined by Heidi Waterhouse, a very special guest with an esteemed and varied career in technical communcation.

In this episode, Lilly and Heidi tackle the challenges of documentation in a world increasingly infused with AI-generated code and text, explore whether prompt engineering is really just technical writing in disguise and examine the difficulties of writing for highly specific audiences.

They also cover Heidi's Progressive Delivery, an upcoming book about bridging the gap between software delivery and business value. It's due to be released in the latter part of 2025 and written alongside James Governor, Kim Harrison and Adam Zimman.

Find out more about Heidi Waterhouse by visiting her website: https://heidiwaterhouse.com/

Learn more about Progressive Delivery: https://itrevolution.com/product/progressive-delivery/