alt Hacker News> This feels sort of like saying "I just blindly threw paint at that canvas on the wall and
> He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it
Difference being Claude looked; so not blind. The equivalent is more like I blindly took a photo of it and then used that to...
Technically did look.
The article is poorly written. Blanchard was a chardet maintainer for years. Of course he had looked at it's code!
What he claimed, and what was interesting, was that Claude didn't look at the code, only the API and the test suite. The new implementation is all Claude. And the implementation is different enough to be considered original, completely different structure, design, and hey, a 48x improvement in performance! It's just API-compatible with the original. Which as per the Google Vs oracle 2021 decision is to be considered fair use.