Porting a venerable library on vibes. What started as a quick WebPerl success spiraled into weeks of failed attempts, mangled ASCII diagrams, and a hard lesson about respecting the craft embedded in battle-tested code.
I absolutely agree that attempting to regenerate 30k lines of code into another language is incredibly overconfident. I’m sure you could probably generate a few hundred lines of code that function as expected. To generate that much code, I expect constant maintenance of the output and a moderate up deep understanding of both the old and new code.
Crappy prompts and overconfidence will produce poor results.
I absolutely agree that attempting to regenerate 30k lines of code into another language is incredibly overconfident. I’m sure you could probably generate a few hundred lines of code that function as expected. To generate that much code, I expect constant maintenance of the output and a moderate up deep understanding of both the old and new code.