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Comment by girvo | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently using it to do a large migration from one Relay environment to another, but this is possible because

1. We've done it by hand for another route already, which the LLM uses as reference

2. Theres a strong validation setup/harness I've setup for it with storybooks, and component tests

3. It's a _mostly_ mechanical transform. Not entirely, as the two environments/APIs are not 1:1, but it's close enough

But! I and my team are still reviewing everything shrug it is "faster" because I get to have this running while I'm in meetings planning other more interesting projects

And this isn't really that many agents in parallel. Yeah, plenty of fan-out subagents, but that IMO doesn't count/isn't really the same as what others are talking about

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I think a problem here is you're overestimating how hard it is to rewrite something when you have one example of how to do it right. Even in the 2000s, I remember a junior essentially rewriting our entire codebase from old school asp vbscript to .Net in a few months. A 100 or so pages back then.

Your team could have done it pre-AI, but you just thought it was hard so you didn't try.

I remember migrating a code base from MySQL to SQL Server in the 2010s. I thought it would take me weeks, if not months. It took me a couple of days.

Immediately made me sour on the "hot" idea in the 2010s that your data layer should be provider agnostic so you could switch if you needed to. That was never a real thing, it was a made up justification for unnecessary over-engineering, by people who had clearly never tried to port an app from one data source to another. There are other reasons for a clear separation, but switching a few hundred SQL statements is not it.

In reality, mechanical ports are not that hard, you can sit down, put some music on and blitz it in a few days. Programmers just over-estimate how hard they will be.

Yes if you know exactly how something should work it is fairly quick to implement. The hard and slow parts are when you only have vague requirements or have to experiment and iterate.

No, I'm not. Because, as I said, we've literally done it first for the first half of our application, and it took us eight engineers for ~5 months.

Its genuinely weird to have you say that so confidently lol

He's talking about exercises for school. So very limited size, scope, and extremely well specified.

Completely different from a real world scenario.

Yeah and you've said yourself, you've already done the hard part.

You're overestimating how hard it would be just to copy what you did and apply it rote manually.

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