alt Hacker News> If the whole point genuinely would have been to do a purely mechanical translation they could and should have written a transpiler, which would have had significantly higher correctness guarantees than this given that it'd be deterministic, but of course that would have defeated the PR purpose of this whole thing, which just looks like a marketing for Anthropic frankly
If it were just a marketing stunt you wouldn't have a fraction of a percent of the test suite passing with the remaining bugs being realistically very fixable, and everything written in languages with type systems that give far more guarantees than what COBOL is possible.
You're being extremely negative about this whole endeavour without looking at the evidence that this effort is going far more smoothly than expected, and maps with many people's experience with using LLMs for tasks like these.
>You're being extremely negative about this whole endeavour without looking at the evidence that this effort is going far more smoothly than expected
no I'm being negative because as I just said, if you want to do a purely syntactic translation you don't even need an LLM, that's called transpilation and we've been doing it programmatically for decades.
This is the kind of thing that looks great to people who can't program, think this is some new superpower unlocked by the mystery magic of LLMs and that is exactly the kind of impression Claude wants to sell.