Stefan Hoth
Engineering Leader
Stefan Hoth is an engineering leader based near Dresden, Germany, with over fifteen years building and shipping software across startups and scale-ups. Most of his professional experience he spent leading platform teams, enabling product teams to ship high quality results. He is currently between roles and working hands-on with AI tools, figuring out what they genuinely change about how we build software, and what they do not.
What AI changed about migrations (and what it didn't)
AI has us questioning every part of how we build software, and it is tempting to assume it can now do all of it.
So I went back to one migration I led and asked: what would I now hand to AI, and what must stay human?
The migration meant decoupling our frontend from a 15-year-old monolith it had fused into. Think Jenga tower: every dependency load-bearing, a button color change triggering a full-stack redeploy. Untangling it was the technical nightmare, and AI would take most of that off my plate today.
But it never stalled on code. It stalled on the work AI cannot do: aligning people on one direction, cutting scope without losing context, winning buy-in and funding, shipping value in small increments. We broke out only when we dropped the grand plan and shipped one feature on a hard deadline.
An honest reflection on what AI makes effortless in a migration, and the judgment it cannot replace: which one is worth doing, and how you get it funded.