The Provable Porting Engine

Presentations, infographics, and mind maps explaining the deterministic, agentic "Provable Porting Engine" for migrating legacy SAS and Excel systems at scale.

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Deterministic Porting & Agentic Engineering: Artifact Repository

Overview

This repository contains a collection of presentations, infographics, and mind maps explaining the “Provable Porting Engine” developed by Blair Nilsson to migrate legacy SAS databases and Excel spreadsheets at scale. The materials contrast Agentic Engineering with vibe coding, illustrating how deterministic orchestration, strict LLM bounding, and mathematical testing can turn a multi-year migration project into a provably accurate, overnight automated run.

🎥 Talks & Videos

Click a thumbnail to watch on YouTube.

Video Talk
How to unscramble an egg AI Agents Transform Legacy Code: How to unscramble an egg
Agentics NZ — turning software back into provably correct specs.
Blair Nilsson's provable porting engine Blair Nilsson’s Provable Porting Engine
Agentics NZ — migrating legacy SAS & spreadsheets at scale.

📊 Presentations (Slide Decks)

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Slides Presentation
Agentic Porting at Scale Agentic Porting at Scale
“Unscrambling the Egg.” The Stats NZ case study — provable migration of legacy SAS and Excel systems via deterministic AI orchestration, transforming 20 years of technical debt into modern infrastructure.
Provable AI Porting Provable AI Porting
The Business Value of Provable AI Porting. The executive / business case for reclaiming technical sovereignty from legacy monoliths.
Unscrambling the Monolith Unscrambling the Monolith
The comprehensive explainer — migrating legacy SAS & Excel to modern stacks via agentic engineering.
The Provable Porting Engine The Provable Porting Engine
The technical deep dive — migrating legacy SAS & spreadsheets at scale via agentic engineering.

🖼️ Infographics

Click a thumbnail to open the full-resolution image.

Visual Description
The Anti-Hallucination Loop The Anti-Hallucination Loop
A provable path for legacy code porting: the forward pass (deconstruction), the backward pass (verification), reassembly, and mathematical testing — trapping AI hallucinations to a <1% failure rate.
Provable High-Accuracy Code Migration Process Provable High-Accuracy Code Migration Process
Why dumping 200k zipped XML files into an LLM fails, and how the deterministic slicer cuts code into sub-100-line fragments for 100% accuracy.
Spreadsheet to Python Logic Transformation From Messy Formulas to Clean Python
The dependency-graph transformation: messy Excel R1C1 formulas are deterministically parsed into clean Mermaid node charts that serve as the prompts for the AI.
Traditional vs. Agentic Porting The Great Migration: Traditional vs. Agentic Porting
A visual comparison of manual human porting versus AI agent porting across cost, speed, and accuracy.
The New Critical Path The New Critical Path: How AI Flipped the Migration Timeline
How the core bottleneck has shifted away from writing code and toward downstream systems, environment setup, and organizational approvals.