What AI Agents for Modernization Look Like in Practice

We’ve all been put onto an initiative to “modernize” our company’s applications. But talk about a haphazard and confusing project to be put on. Apps are older than anyone first thought, there are dependencies nobody can explain, and business critical services blocked behind another team's roadmap. Yet all of them are competing for the same developers.

It’s overwhelming! What can you do?

AI agents are helping teams unravel the modernization maze. Mandy Whaley wrote a recent post introducing some of the latest tech let’s take a bit of a deeper look.

Most teams do not have a one-app problem

GitHub Copilot modernization helps solve the problem of having to sort through several applications to modernize. You don’t have to be alone managing different complexities, dependencies, urgency, and ages of modernizing multiple applications! GitHub Copilot modernization helps create a repeatable way to understand each application before developers get their hands dirty.

The GitHub Copilot modernization workflow

GitHub Copilot modernization helps teams upgrade .NET projects and migrate them to Azure.

It’s first going to assess your project and produce a markdown file that gives you an overview of what all needs to be done. Then it plans out the steps of the upgrade in more detail. Finally, it gets to it ,performing the code changes, fixes and validation.

It works across Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, the GitHub Copilot CLI, and GitHub.com.

The Assessment Step

The workflow starts with assessment: project, structure, dependencies, code patterns.

GitHub Copilot modernization examines your project structure, dependencies, and code patterns to identify what needs to change. It generates an dotnet-upgrade-plan.md file in .github/upgrades so you have something concrete to review before the workflow moves forward. Plus, you can choose your .NET version (8, 9 or 10), supporting modernization standards and patterns in your organization,

The Planning Step

Once you approve the assessment that the GitHub Copilot modernization agent creates and you always get to approve before it proceeds to the next step,it moves on to planning.

The planning step documents the approach in more detail. According to the documentation, the plan covers upgrade strategies, refactoring approaches, dependency upgrade paths, and risk mitigations. You can review and edit that Markdown before moving on to execution.

The Execution Step

Approve the planning document and the agent moves into execution mode. Here it breaks the plan down into discrete tasks with concrete validation criteria. And once everything looks good it begins to make changes to the code base.

From there, we begin the upgrade work. If Copilot runs into a problem, it tries to identify the cause and apply a fix. Updating the task status and it creates Git commits for each portion of the process so you can review what changed or roll back if needed!

The benefits of the steps

By breaking each stage down into concrete steps teams get the chance to review the plan, understand what is changing, and decide where manual intervention is still needed. Architects and app owners have something concrete to look at, change if necessary, and push to version.

Migrating to the cloud

GitHub Copilot modernization is not limited to moving a project to a newer version of .NET. It also helps assess cloud readiness, recommend Azure resources, apply migration best practices, and support deployment to Azure.

The Azure migration process of Copilot modernization helps answer questions like: Where should the application run? What services should I use with it? What parts of the application should stay in place for now, and what parts should be adapted for Azure?

Teams can work through migration paths related to managed identity, Azure SQL, Azure Blob Storage, Azure File Storage, Microsoft Entra ID, Azure Key Vault, Azure Service Bus, Azure Cache for Redis, and OpenTelemetry on Azure. That is the kind of work that moves an application beyond a version update and into a more complete modernization effort.

Humans still matter

Agents can reduce manual work, can help teams move through assessment, planning, and repetitive tasks faster. Giving developers a better starting point and help keep progress visible in the repo.

But the important decisions still belong to people! Architects still need to make tradeoffs. Application owners still need to think about business value, timing, and risk. Developers still need to review the code, check the plan, and decide where human judgment is required.

The GitHub Copilot modernization speeds the process up by doing tedious work for you. You’re still in control of the decisions and responsible for the code it outputs, but it takes care of the work to perform the assessment, planning, and code changes.

Give it a shot by picking just one project and running the assessment and reviewing the plan. See what it comes up with. Then when you’re ready, move on to the rest of your application portfolio.

Modernization at scale still happens application by application, repo by repo, and decision by decision.

Use the GitHub Copilot modernization agent, spin it up and try it, and let us know what you think in the comments.