AI Coding Agents Are Breaking Big Codebases — Dan Adler, Sourcegraph

Claude Code can make the change. But what if you have 90,000 repositories to make it in? Dan Adler, CEO of Sourcegraph, makes the case for the people who own the huge, decades-old codebases that run banks, cars and airlines. Coding agents are producing a tidal wave of code, and those codebases are starting to decay through duplicated code, drifting standards, brittle dependencies and new vulnerabilities. Agents understand code by searching, but you can't grep what you can't see. Dan argues that large-scale code visibility is infrastructure, and introduces Sourcegraph's Agentic Batch Changes for making changes across thousands of repos from a single prompt. In this talk: • Why most software engineers work in large, long-lived codebases • How AI-generated code accelerates codebase decay • Why context, not model quality, is the bottleneck at enterprise scale • Making and auditing changes across thousands of repos SPEAKER Dan Adler, CEO, Sourcegraph LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielnealadler/ X: https://x.com/DanielNealAdler LINKS Sourcegraph: https://sourcegraph.com Introducing Agentic Batch Changes: https://sourcegraph.com/blog/introducing-agentic-batch-changes CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:12 Owning a large codebase 0:37 The software that runs the world 2:02 A tidal wave of AI-generated code 2:57 Codebases are starting to decay 3:57 Owning a codebase is harder than ever 4:31 "I don't know what this code does" 5:11 Codebase owners deserve better 6:06 A call to dev tools builders 6:31 "I have 90,000 repositories" 7:21 Agents love to search 7:51 You can't grep what you can't see 8:21 There will be much more code 8:56 The code graph 9:21 Agentic Batch Changes 10:21 Case study: Mercari 11:11 How many repos do you really have? Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 in San Francisco. Subscribe for more talks from the engineers building with AI. AI Engineer: https://ai.engineer YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiDotEngineer X: https://x.com/aiDotEngineer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aidotengineer/ #AICoding #DevTools #AIEngineer