Nashville JUG - Automated software refactoring with OpenRewrite and OpenAI

Description

The software industrial revolution has arrived. Software is now 80% open source and third-party and 20% proprietary code that stitches it together into business-critical applications. We are challenged with the ongoing evolution of increasingly large and diversely composed codebases and ecosystems. Dependencies change frequently and evolve at their own pace. Security vulnerabilities can be introduced at any time by anyone. Not updating regularly leads to critical bugs, performance, and security issues.

In this talk, we’ll introduce OpenRewrite, an open-source, automated refactoring and dependency management technology born at Netflix in 2016. It’s built on manipulating the Lossless Semantic Tree (LST) representation of code with recipes (programs) that result in 100% accurate style-preserving code transformations. It is a rule-based, authoritative system. We'll show a generative AI procedure created by one of Moderne's financial services customers that samples source code to identify defects and uses OpenRewrite to fix them. This is a general-purpose pattern you'll start seeing a lot of — "ChatGPT gets a computer" (with OpenRewrite as the computer in this case).