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Comment by AIPedant | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I figured this was clickbait but my jaw still dropped a bit when I saw this:

  I cloned the backend for Truco and gave Claude a long prompt explaining the rules of Escoba and asking it to refactor the code to implement it.

How long would it take the human dev to refactor the code themselves? I think it's plausible that it would be longer than 3 days, but maybe not!

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I don't know I feel like rewriting a backend for one card game into a backend for another wouldn't be that difficult, especially for the original dev. Once you've worked out how to represent cards and code the rules you're basically there for any card game.

Also, a refactor is by definition rewriting code without changing the behaviour. Worth knowing the difference.

As an LLM hater, I have to say, this is exactly the use case I want code generation for. If I need to figure out the problem as I develop, which is the case for new code, the model can kindly get out of my way. But if I have already written a bunch of code and I can explain the problem with the understanding that I've gained from my implementation and have the bot redo the grunt work? fine with me..

>As an LLM hater

I thought this was the start of a joke or something, I guess if you use LLMs you are a "LLM lover" then.

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