A meta-trend I find interesting is there's a lot of projects using AI to rewrite existing systems in new programming languages. Most often in Rust.

  1. Bun rewritten in Rust
  2. Flow rewritten in Rust
  3. The react compiler was rewritten in Rust
  4. Grit is a new implementation of Git in Rust
  5. I've made my own rust rewrite of postgres that passes 100% of the regression and isolation tests[0][1]

I think AI changed the economics of these projects even more than it has the economics for software engineering work in general. Though direct AI code translation is usually slop for me.

One of the many things I did to deal with this was an audit skill that would:

  1. Find a small chunk of code to rewrite
  2. Have a list of things that it was looking for in each piece of code that's being rewritten
  3. Place that next to the code being translated
  4. If that document didn't exist and/or didn't say the code was passing the audit, code wouldn't be merged
  5. As I found problems and anti-patterns I would add those to the skill over time

This by itself still let a lot of slop slip through, but also preemptively caught a ton of issues as part of my overall process.

Complicated old "boring" infra software might actually be the most AI-rewriteable code right now

[0] https://pgrust.com

[1] https://github.com/malisper/pgrust