alt Hacker NewsI work on a codebase from the early 2000s, a lot of it using webforms, a long abandoned .NET technology. A rewrite preserving all behavior and making no observable changes whatsoever would be amazing. But it’s also tested exactly as well as you’d expect from something like that so I’d rather not let AI go wild.
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trollbridge • today at 7:44 AM
LLMs/agents are a great way to create a test harness for something like that.
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Good example. Transitioning from an outdated framework to a modern (or sometimes "slightly less outdated") one is probably one of the few situations where you do not want to change semantics at all.
And in my experience, these are _dangerous_. People go into "while we're at it..." mode, and it quickly turns into a big 2.0 kind of thing that takes forever.
I would argue that LLMs can speed this kind of thing up, but not by an order of magnitude or anything, just a bit. Unless there's high risk appetite.