From Contracts to Confidence: Spring Cloud Contract 5 in the Age of AI
Marcin Grzejszczak - HeroDevs
Spring Cloud Contract 5 is a special release. It focuses on removing legacy concepts, simplifying the codebase, and making breaking changes that have been postponed for too long.
In this talk, the maintainer of Spring Cloud Contract will explain why these removals and migrations were necessary, what problems they solve in real-world Spring-based systems, and how to approach upgrading existing projects with confidence. Along the way, we’ll look at the trade-offs behind the decisions and common migration challenges.
To close, we’ll explore where contract testing might go next. In particular, we’ll discuss how AI-assisted tooling could help teams work with contracts, validate assumptions, and reason about service interactions - especially as systems grow in size and complexity. Also we’ll talk about how specification-based AI-assisted coding is critical with tools like Claude Code.
This session is aimed at developers working with Spring and distributed systems who want to understand not just what changed in Spring Cloud Contract 5, but why it changed - and how the project can evolve further.