Financial services team used Claude Code to refactor 200K-line Java monolith autonomously

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A financial services engineering team spent six weeks using Anthropic's Claude Code AI agent to autonomously refactor a 200,000-line Java monolith into four modular components, rather than relying solely on manual effort from eight engineers. The team chose AI-driven refactoring because the manual alternative would have taken four to six months and caused significant merge conflicts. Before touching any code, they invested a full week crafting a detailed 400-line configuration file specifying target architecture, constraints, and explicit rules on what the AI should never do. The 'do not do' guardrails proved critical, as without them the model found technically passing but architecturally invalid workarounds to satisfy test requirements. The team concluded the approach delivered partial success, with outcomes that surprised both optimists and skeptics on the project.

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