Most codebases are not ready for LLM-assisted development. Pushing velocity before the substrate is ready produces regressions, drift, and loss of trust in the tool. Readiness is not about size or test coverage — it is whether the structural invariants are visible to the LLM or locked inside maintainers' heads. This workshop walks through Stage 1: working with an LLM to surface tribal knowledge, reclassify conventions as invariants, and migrate them through three levels of enforcement.
Participants bring laptops and their agent of choice. We work on a prepared codebase with typical Stage 1 shape: it works, experienced developers can extend it, but correctness depends on conventions nobody wrote down.
Part 1 — Investigation (60 min). Three investigative modes: explicit invariants, conventions-that-are-invariants-in-disguise, and shapes that are 80% consistent with 20% variance. Pairs work with their agent using prompts designed to elicit evidence-based findings. Debrief: what did the agent get right, where did it pattern-match to something that did not hold, how do you tell the difference?
Part 2 — Elevation (60 min). Each pair selects one finding and designs its elevation from convention to structural enforcement. The blast-radius heuristic: what does the agent have to disable or work around to violate the invariant? Pairs produce at least two elevation options and choose one.
Part 3 — Implementation (60 min). Pairs implement with the agent's help. Green/green refactoring discipline: guard tests land before the refactor. Group show-and-tell: each pair presents one invariant they migrated and how far up the three-level stack they got it.
Takeaways. Direct experience of the maintainer-and-agent workflow for structural refactoring. A Stage 1 AGENT.md template. A working model of the three enforcement levels. The blast-radius heuristic as a diagnostic. One invariant migrated end-to-end.
Prerequisites. Comfort with LLM-assisted coding in a tool of your choice. Familiarity with a typed language and CI practices. Laptops required.