Comment by Aurornis
6 days ago
Translating a project that includes a good test suite from one language to another is known to be a great case where LLMs work well.
When you’re starting with a complete codebase to use as an example and a test suite to check everything it’s much easier to iterate toward the desired goal. The LLM can already see what the goals are and how they’ve been implemented once already, which is a much easier problem than starting from a spec.
Great case where rust works well too. I won't cite every famous libs that got rewritten in rust but it wasn't all with LLM.
I fail to think of a successful Rust rewrite, so far what I've seen is just programmers who aren't sufficiently experienced, who decide to pick Rust and rewrite something in it, and then (this is the bad part) claim it's better for that reason only. It never is. It's always worse, because rewrites fundamentally end up with a worse product first.
https://fishshell.com/blog/rustport/
ruff is a rust rewrite of flake8. Got bought by OpenAI after a meteoric rise in the python ecosystem.
It's not hard to imagine a future where the only things committed to git repos are tests and specs.
And maybe not even the tests. Just a specification for the tests.
I can see open source projects as just prompts as well.
Sure, but, given that, does it not seem like the conclusion is: if you have something that could in principle be reverse engineered by a competitor with more compute, they can and will steal it, because the only constraint is roi.
The goal posts are always moving. This would have been an unthinkable task a couple years ago.
Even last year at this time people wouldn't believe it.