Restoration of a 20-year-old Java “Big Ball of Mud” using AI and Docker This article explains the approach I used to modernize a Java 1.5 codebase that no longer built reliably on modern machines. My early use of LLMs gave me plausible answers that did not hold up in the codebase. Progress came when I grounded the process in evidence, using AI to support analysis, validation in a stable Docker env

