Migrating to Jetpack Compose: How AI Accelerated Our Journey at Caper

Instacart's Caper team turned a multi-quarter Fragment-to-Compose migration into a dramatically faster effort using AI coding assistants.

Matt Kranzler from Instacart shares how their team migrated 130+ Android screens powering smart shopping carts from Fragments to Jetpack Compose. They developed a four-phase strategy that let them leverage AI to accelerate what would have been months of tedious refactoring work.

Key Takeaways

• AI reduced Phase 2 migration time by 5-7x, saving 300-350 engineering hours
• Four-phase approach decoupled navigation from UI refactoring to reduce risk
• Evolved from markdown guides to structured AI skills for consistent migrations
• Treated AI instructions as code with 325+ line migration guide
• Ran migrations parallel to feature work without blocking product roadmap

The team's progression from manual migrations to AI skills reveals a repeatable playbook now being adopted across Instacart's engineering organization.