Use Agents to Kill Technical Debt Without Killing Your Weekend

Microsoft Access dragging you down?

If you’ve spent any time in enterprise IT, you’ve seen it: a mission-critical Microsoft Access app held together by duct tape, VBA, and the prayers of a retired admin named Bob. It’s clunky, it’s stuck on a local drive, and it gives your security team anxiety and heartache.

And you can’t just turn it off. It’s "load-bearing" technical debt. But you're not alone. So many businesses still run critical processes on Access... And every year the gap between those legacy apps and what modern teams actually need keeps getting wider.

So whaddya do? A full rewrite is big, expensive and risky. And finding developers who still understand VBA? Good luck because most of them have moved on or retired (side note, I don't like to brag but I was a VBA product manager in the 1990s...) But I digress. 

So anyway, that's exactly the problem our cloud solutions architect Santiago Arango tackled in a recent live demo with Jeff Fritz at .NET Conf. Santi's results are pretty eye-opening.

Watch the Demo

In the video, Santi takes a Microsoft Access application with forms, VBA code, local database, the whole shebang and walks through how GAP's agentic modernization system transforms it into a clean, modern Blazor web app running on .NET 10. 

The output is production-quality Blazor code with HTML, C# and Bootstrap baked right in. It's responsive out of the box so it works on browsers, tablets and phones. And here's the part that gets devs really excited: all those raw SQL statements from Access? They get replaced with well-written Entity Framework, complete with performance best practices like AsNoTracking() that even experienced devs sometimes forget.

What Makes This Different

GAPVelocity AI uses a system of specialized AI agents that mimic the full software development lifecycle. One set of agents analyzes the legacy application by understanding every form, every data connection, every table relationship. Another set handles code generation and conversion. And yet another validates quality and expected outcomes against the original application.

The result? Between 80-90% of the migration is fully automated. The remaining 10-20% is the stuff that should be human-driven. Things like custom authentication, UI personalization, and any business logic tweaks specific to your organization.

A few highlights from the demo worth calling out:

Your data and schema move to Azure SQL (or whatever database engine you prefer, Postgres, Oracle, MySQL, since the output uses Entity Framework migrations). Variable names and business logic are kept familiar so your team isn't starting from scratch trying to understand the new codebase. And because the output is standard Blazor with Bootstrap, your developers can customize the look and feel as much or as little as they want. Even drop in a $20 Bootstrap theme and instantly level up the UI.

The Bigger Picture

As Jeff put it during the demo, when you've got legacy applications where the original developers have left or retired, having AI agents that can deeply analyze and understand that code is a game-changer. 

Microsoft's own modernization tools work well for certain scenarios, but when you're dealing with older technologies like Access and VBA that those tools can't support, that's where GAPVelocity AI's approach fills the gap.

If you're sitting on legacy Access, VB6, Web Forms or other aging applications and wondering what your path forward looks like, this demo is a great place to start.