---
title: "Benchmarking Coding Agents on New vs Legacy Code bases"
category: "talks"
date: "2026-07-01"
time: "12:05pm-12:25pm"
track: "Agentic Engineering"
room: "Track 8"
speakers: ["Denys Linkov"]
sourceLabels: ["Official conference schedule", "Public YouTube metadata"]
scheduleTrack: "Agentic Engineering"
scheduleRoom: "Track 8"
scheduleLabels: ["Agentic Engineering", "Track 8", "session", "confirmed"]
---
# Benchmarking Coding Agents on New vs Legacy Code bases

## Conference Context
- Date/time: 2026-07-01 · 12:05pm-12:25pm
- Track/room: Agentic Engineering · Track 8
- Speaker(s): Denys Linkov
- Session type/status: session · confirmed

- Track: Agentic Engineering
- Room: Track 8
- Session type: session
- Status: confirmed

## Session Description
You have an old code base with 100,000s of lines of code, should you let an AI Agent refactor or do you wait until you have a cleaner setup? Last year we refactored a number of code bases and ran evaluations on how well different models, harnesses and rule sets affected multiple versions of the code base. This talk will feature specific code examples as well as a broader set of evals.

## Media Evidence
[Structuring a modern AI team — Denys Linkov, Wisedocs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbUxRluVRwk) (speaker-match related prior/adjacent AI Engineer video; captions: English auto-captions).

- Source video: `youtube-SbUxRluVRwk`
- Slide deck: [[youtube-SbUxRluVRwk-dense-slides|Dense Slides: Structuring a modern AI team — Denys Linkov, Wisedocs]] — 1 visible slide image(s); 1 HTML recreation(s).
![[assets/dense-slides/SbUxRluVRwk/slide-001.jpg]]
- Additional slide evidence: [[youtube-SbUxRluVRwk-slides|Slides: Structuring a modern AI team — Denys Linkov, Wisedocs]], [[youtube-SbUxRluVRwk-reconstructed-slides|Reconstructed Slides: Structuring a modern AI team — Denys Linkov, Wisedocs]]
- Slide-derived themes for `youtube-SbUxRluVRwk`: technology, company, solution, services, enabled, tech.

## Evidence Graph
This evidence graph is generated from currently linked source material: official schedule text, related video pages, cached transcripts, visible slide text, dense/reconstructed slide pages, and AI slide-classification audits.

### Media Signals
- `youtube-SbUxRluVRwk` — 1 slide-derived text signals
- Slide-derived themes for `youtube-SbUxRluVRwk`: technology, company, solution, services, enabled, tech.
- Evidence links for `youtube-SbUxRluVRwk`: [[youtube-SbUxRluVRwk]], [[youtube-SbUxRluVRwk-slides]], [[youtube-SbUxRluVRwk-dense-slides]], [[youtube-SbUxRluVRwk-reconstructed-slides]]

### Agent Reading Notes
Use these signals to refine the synopsis, topic links, people/company context, and method notes. If a source is a related external video rather than an exact official recording, keep it framed as supporting evidence.

## Transcript Status
Related video transcript availability: English auto-captions. Treat this as supporting context, not a recording of this exact scheduled session unless later confirmed. Not fetched yet.

## People
- [[denys-linkov]]

## Supporting Slides
- [[youtube-SbUxRluVRwk-slides]] — extracted from the related public AI Engineer video.

## Slide Evidence
- Slide-only cropped deck: [[youtube-SbUxRluVRwk-dense-slides]] (1 viable slide images).
- Related slide/OCR pages:
- [[youtube-SbUxRluVRwk-dense-slides]]
- [[youtube-SbUxRluVRwk-reconstructed-slides]]
- [[youtube-SbUxRluVRwk-slides]]
- Slide-derived terms: `hiring`, `awws`, `graphite`, `windsurf`, `mongobb`, `mdaily`, `augment`, `code`, `workos`, `expectations`, `explain`, `modern`, `team`, `themes`, `olean`, `evolution`, `generalist`, `question`

## Attendance Visibility
No high-confidence attendance icon signal is shown for this talk. The sampled video evidence was either low confidence, source-proxy-only, or did not expose a clear audience view.

## Synthesis
### Synthesized Breakdown
# Benchmarking Coding Agents on New vs Legacy Code bases ## Conference Context - Date/time: 2026-07-01 · 12:05pm-12:25pm - Track/room: Agentic Engineering · Track 8 - Speaker(s): Denys Linkov - Session type/status: session · confirmed - Track: Agentic Engineering - Room: Track 8 - Session type: session - Status: confirmed ## Session Description You have an old code base with 100,000s of lines of code, should you let an AI Agent refactor or do you wait until you have a cleaner setup? Last year we refactored a number of code bases and ran evaluations on how well different models, harnesses and rule sets affected multiple versions of the code base. This talk will feature specific code examples as well as a broader set of evals. ## Media Evidence [Structuring a modern AI team — Denys Linkov, Wisedocs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbUxRluVRwk) (speaker-match related prior/adjacent AI Engineer video; captions: English auto-captions).

### Speaker And Company Context
- [[denys-linkov|Denys Linkov]] — Head of ML at [[wisedocs|Wisedocs]].

### Topics Covered
- [[agentic-search]]
- [[agentic-web]]
- [[coding-agents]]

### Derived Links And Source Material
- [[youtube-SbUxRluVRwk]] — related YouTube source page.
- [[youtube-SbUxRluVRwk-slides]] — slide evidence.
- [[youtube-SbUxRluVRwk-reconstructed-slides]] — slide evidence.
- [[youtube-SbUxRluVRwk-dense-slides]] — slide evidence.

### Novel Concepts / Clever Methods
- No highlighted novel concept has been detected yet.

### Evidence Boundary
This synthesis is based on the official schedule and linked source pages. It should be revisited when exact session recordings or transcript-backed secondary sources are available.