Comment by pertymcpert
17 hours ago
Why did you jump to the assumption that this:
> The new normal isn't like that. Rewrite an existing cleanly implemented Vanilla JavaScript project (with tests) in React the kind of rote task you can throw at a coding agent like Claude Code and come back the next morning and expect most (and occasionally all) of the work to be done.
... meant that person would do it in a clandestine fashion rather than this be an agreed upon task prior? Is this how you operate?
My very first sentence:
> And everyone else's work has to be completely put on hold
On a big enough team, getting everyone to a stopping point where they can wait for you to do your big bang refactor to the entire code base- even if it is only a day later- is still really disruptive.
The last time I went through something like this, we did it really carefully, migrating a page at a time from a multi page application to a SPA. Even that required ensuring that whichever page transitioned didn't have other people working on it, let alone the whole code base.
Again, I simply don't buy that you're going to be able to AI your way through such a radical transition on anything other than a trivial application with a small or tiny team.
> meant that person would do it in a clandestine fashion rather than this be an agreed upon task prior? Is this how you operate?
This doesn't mean this at all
In an AI heavy project it's not unusual to have many speculative refactors kicked off and then you come back to see what it is like.
Wonder you can do a Rust SIMD optimized version of that Numpy code you have? Try it! You don't even need to waste review time on it because you have heavy test coverage and can see if it is worth looking at.
If you have 100s of devs working on the project it’s not possible to do a full rewrite in one go. So its to about clandestine but rather that there’s just no way to get it done regardless of how much AI superpowers you bring to bear.