Speaker Spotlight: Benedikt Terhechte – Humans Still Needed: Learnings from Refactoring an Ancient Codebase

By Agentic Hamburg Team

Benedikt Terhechte shares what it takes to port a 100k LoC Obj-C/OpenGL iOS game to modern iOS with AI – and where the agent hit its limits.

Speaker Spotlight: Benedikt Terhechte – Humans Still Needed: Learnings from Refactoring an Ancient Codebase

We’re excited to announce Benedikt Terhechte as a speaker at Agentic Conf Hamburg on March 22nd!

About Benedikt

Benedikt Terhechte is Director of IRON at MoonPay. He previously worked on the iOS Platform team at XING and has always had a love for side projects — which have only been increasing now that AI makes it much easier to go from idea to solution.

The Talk: Humans Still Needed: Learnings from Refactoring an Ancient Codebase

AI agents have become fantastic at green field projects. However, getting them to work correctly on existing, complex codebases can be a challenge. Benedikt recently ported a 100k LoC Obj-C/OpenGL iOS game from 2011 to modern iOS with the help of Claude Opus.

This required much more than a simple prompt. The agent lacked the creativity to solve this task, it was often overwhelmed, and some problems required a change of abstraction.

The talk will go through the initial setup, how he improved it during the project, what the agent struggled with, and how he was able to guide it.

See Benedikt Live

Catch this talk and many more at Agentic Conf Hamburg on March 22, 2026 at SAE Institute Hamburg.

👉 Get your tickets on Luma

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