For a decade, software teams have obsessed over velocity: faster deploys, tighter feedback loops, more features shipped per sprint.

But while shipping got faster, maintenance didn’t. Upgrades, dependency cleanups, and migrations still consume 30-50% of engineering time. This is invisible work that keeps the lights on but stalls innovation. And that’s the paradox: the more we accelerate, the more technical upkeep we create.

At Tidra, we believe the next leap in developer productivity isn’t about writing more code. It’s about maintaining code at scale, automatically, and safely.

The tradeoff every engineering leader knows

Every engineering org feels it: the constant tradeoff between building and maintaining.

“We need to ship features — but half the team is tied up on upgrades.”

This isn’t a minor drag; it’s a massive drain. The average engineer spends roughly 14 hours per week on “keep-the-lights-on” tasks — dependency updates, security patches, migrations, and cleanup work.

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For a 100-engineer company, that’s about 1,400 hours every week lost to repetitive maintenance. That’s $1.5 million in annual engineering capacity that never touches a product feature.

Teams have accepted that tradeoff as inevitable. It isn’t.

The real problem: Coordination, not code

Developers don’t need AI to write more code. They need AI to plan and execute consistent changes across hundreds of repos, without derailing product delivery.

Traditional tools don’t address this:

• Copilots help inside one repo, with one developer at the keyboard.
• Scanners flag vulnerabilities but don’t actually fix them.
• Codemods automate single-pattern refactors but break across diverse stacks.
  
  

The hard part isn’t the code edit; it’s the orchestration — defining scope, planning execution, coordinating PRs, and tracking progress across dozens or hundreds of repositories.

That’s where Tidra comes in.

A new solution: The AI maintenance agent

Tidra is an AI-powered maintenance agent built to run large-scale engineering initiatives — like upgrades, migrations, and deprecations — safely and consistently across many repos.

Here’s how it works:

1. You define an initiative (“Upgrade Python → 3.11,” “Remove Lodash,” or “Migrate logging client.”)
2. Tidra generates a plan and estimates complexity per repo.
3. It opens PRs/MRs with summaries and checklists.
4. A human reviews and gives feedback
5. Tidra iterates on feedback and test results until green.
6. You get a summary of hours reclaimed per initiative, per category of maintenance, and cumulative over time

The result? A month-long upgrade campaign turns into a few days of review and merge.

From tradeoff to advantage

Tidra exists to end the tradeoff between velocity and maintenance.
It gives engineering leaders back the time that’s been leaking out of their roadmap for years.

• Reclaim time: 4+ hours per engineer, per week.
• Scale with confidence: One plan, dozens or hundreds of consistent PRs.
• Stay safe: Every change is reviewable and test-aware.
• Prove value: Hours saved are tracked and reportable.

When maintenance becomes measurable and automated, it stops being an invisible cost and starts becoming a strategic advantage.

Our point of view: The future of velocity is maintenance automation

We see a clear shift ahead:

Human-in-the-loop, AI-at-scale

We don’t believe in magic “autonomous fixers.”
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Tidra is built for trust, not hype.

• Human review by default. Every change is explainable and under your control.
• Cross-repo first. Designed for scale, not single-repo edits.
• Clarity over magic. Transparent plans, diffs, and time-savings data.
• Safety over speed. Tidra respects your test suite and merge process.

Automation only works if you can trust it, and trust is built on visibility.

Where it matters most

Tidra is already transforming how platform and DevOps teams handle:

• Framework and dependency upgrades
• Library deprecations and replacements
• Security-driven changes
• Consistency and standards enforcement across repos

Every initiative Tidra automates reclaims time that would have been lost to coordination and repetitive fixes, freeing engineers to focus on building the future.

The next era of engineering ops

Over the next five years, AI maintenance is expected to become as foundational as CI/CD pipelines are today.
Companies that adopt it early will deliver faster, stay more secure, and attract engineers who’d rather ship than babysit dependencies.

The future isn’t just “AI that writes your code.”
It’s AI that maintains your codebase so your team can keep moving.

Engineering productivity isn’t about doing more; it’s about doing less of what doesn’t matter.

Tidra’s mission is simple: Maintenance isn’t the cost of velocity. It’s the constraint we can now remove. And when that constraint disappears, software teams can finally do what they do best — build.

Request a demo of Tidra AI to see how we can help you reclaim hundreds of hours of engineering team time each month.

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