Comment by codazoda
5 hours ago
I’ve built a retro operating system and programming environment for ESP32 microcontrollers called BASIC32.
I took it to 39% complete, as a language, over 8-weeks. Then, I spent just 50 minutes describing all the missing parts and it finished the language in 1-shot. I didn’t think it would work. It did.
I used Opus 5.5 on a $20 plan and I didn’t even hit my limits.
I have a feeling that the 39% served as a good framework for the LLM to work on the remaining part while keeping it consistent with the existing structure and style. So, in a sense, your 8 weeks are a big part of why it succeeded.
Yeah I've experienced that at work. I see a lot of comments on here saying you can't one shot features in real world software, but we do, and yes we still have a human review the code with a high bar.
But we've also spend a lot of effort over the past year and a half to make the codebase and tooling more approachable to LLMs so they know how we like to do things and follow our standards.