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Not to take away from your experience but to offer a counterpoint. I used claude code to port rust pdb parsing library to typescript. My SumatraPDF is a large
by kjksf 8mo ago
Not to take away from your experience but to offer a counterpoint.
I used claude code to port rust pdb parsing library to typescript.
My SumatraPDF is a large C++ app and I wanted visibility into where does the size of functions / data go, layout of classes. So I wanted to build a tool to dump info out of a PDB. But I have been diagnosed with extreme case of Rustophobiatis so I just can't touch rust code. Hence, the port to typescript.
With my assistance it did the work in an afternoon and did it well. The code worked. I ran it against large PDB from SumatraPDF and it matched the output of other tools.
In a way porting from one language to another is extreme case of refactoring and Claude did it very well.
I think that in general (your experience notwithstanding) Claude Caude is excellent at refactorings.
Here are 3 refactorings from SumatraPDF where I asked claude code to simplify code written by a human:
https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/a472d32048da750b45a9b39ba5da3e649d6165c5 https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/a472d3...
https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/5624aa73729b0a5aaea8bc4c5d95328d5f7ec6ff https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/5624aa...
https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/a40bc91e4da2338bf8cc8748277416db058ee58d https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/a40bc9...
I hope you agree the code written by Claude is better than the code written by a human.
Granted, those are small changes but I think it generalizes into bigger changes. I have few refactorings in mind I wanted to do for a long time and maybe with Claude they will finally be feasible (they were not feasible before only because I don't have infinite amount of time to do everything I want to do).
- pja 8mo ago“I want this thing, but in a different language” seems to be something that the current generation of cutting edge LLMs are pretty good at. Translating a vibe is something the Ur-LLMS (GPT3 etc) were very good at so it’s not entirely surprising that the current state of the art is to be found in things of a “translate thing X that already exists into context Y” nature.