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Comment by UltraSane | Hacker News Reader

I found this part to be interesting/clever:

1. Extract the data representation

Ask the LLM to represent your code as any combination of:

    graphs
    ontologies
    hierarchical state machines
    UML process charts
    constraints
    math formulae

2 Operate on the representations

3 Convert representations back to code

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Do we think that was necessary? What would have happened if OP had just asked it to rewrite and test/validate each piece as it went until everything is verified and complete?

My gut feeling is this is doing way too much, and it would've figured it out.

But we know, Bun was 535496 lines for $165000.

The whole point of this experiment was to try and make the rewrite as cheap as possible.

Oh no, bun had quite a bit of machinery: https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust#loops-that-write-review-cod...

True, the main problem is how to split the work. They decided to go file by file.

To be fair, I haven't try exactly "rewrite in Rust" prompt, but I cannot imagine for this to work.

converting code to more abstract and denser representations and then manipulating them makes sense to me. Finding better representations is like half of mathematics.

Is code being converted to / represented in maths that much more helpful for an LLM that deals in language primarily, by definition? I have no idea, interesting though!

this is the meat, yes.

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