# Tom Isles — AI Engineer Sydney 2026

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Canonical page: https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/tom-isles/
Program status: The speaker lineup and talk descriptions are public. Session days, times, rooms and the full timetable have not yet been published.

## Compounding lessons into skills: How we performed a large code migration using AI (with no new bugs!)


Canva's "Ingredient Generation" service powers all of our media generation experiences. Every image, video, audio and 3d object request for generation goes through this service, which offers 50+ AI Models. One of its core capabilities is the ability to automatically switch between models when one fails.

As the service has grown, product logic specific to individual models got tangled up with inference logic. GPT Image 1 could tailor its image to a users design aesthetic, while Gemini couldn't. When the system failed over to a back up model, features the backup didn't support would silently break - no error, just a bad result.

Fixing it meant migrating 70,000 lines of code, to extract the feature logic from the inference logic into separate packages. But, the complexity was too high to do it in a single pull request - it needed to be done gradually, with care.

The migration touched every live AI request on the platform. One wrong step and it's a major outage. Pre-AI, this might have taken months. A team of 3 did it in just over a month, using AI.

This talk is about migrating 70,000 lines of live code without an outage using AI. It covers why the riskiest decisions stayed manual, how agent mistakes were turned into reusable skills, and how AI was used to ensure a safe and smooth rollout that resulted in a successful migration - without a single bug introduced in the process.

## Tom Isles

Staff Software Engineer, Canva

Tom Isles is a Staff Software Engineer on Canva's Generative Foundations team. He has been at Canva for over 7 years. Since 2022, he has acted as a technical lead for Canva's generative media platform, which powers many of Canva's generative AI products.

Tom has been closely involved in Canva's AI media product launches. He has led the development of products like Magic Media & Magic Layers, while also being involved in the launches of other products like Canva AI, Magic Studio & Style Match.

Recently, Tom led a 70,000+ line migration of model inference logic in Canva's ingredient generation server - one of the more technically demanding pieces of infrastructure work behind Canva's generative media platform.

## Conference

- [Conference overview](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/index.md)
- [Agent guide](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/for-agents/)
- [llms.txt](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/llms.txt)