Not sure it’s so simple. I think close to 100% of new ambitious projects are going to leverage AI at least to some degree. I know a couple that have strict no-AI policies (e.g. Zig), but it’s a tiny minority i think.

So how much AI usage does it make it an “AI rewrite”?

For instance, the TypeScript rewrite in Go was done mostly by humans and took a year before it was released. That is how you rewrite software that people can trust.

rewrites feel like an area where LLMs are better suited than humans imo

It’s mostly grunt work and LLMs are well suited for translation tasks (iirc transformers arch was originally invented for translation)

It is more and more the future. No human would want to rewrite one technology to another because it is too marginal a gain. AI on the other hand does not give a shit.

I agree but I think from Bun we learned that a project with really good tests and enough tokens can be converted from one language to another quite good!

It’s just a build step now.

It's not that... It's a rewrite by project maintainers vs a fork.

Is there any measurable difference in quality between the two, or are you just going on "vibes"? Is there a correlation between the quality of the manually written code and AI generated code driven by the same dev?

Such crude takes only cause unnecessary friction. If you have a black box that spits out code, and you are unable to distinguish the quality between a top tier dev and an AI inside the black box, then the distinction is unnecessary. Most of the code on the internet is already a black box to you. What percentage of code running on your machines have you vetted by who wrote it and code quality?

AI coding isn't going anywhere and will likely end up generating most code going forward so instead of rejecting it outright or arbitrarily categorizing it we need to focus on solid quantitative and qualitative measures of code and functionality regardless of who wrote it.

We already have a well established term for AI rewrites.

I'd %100 prefer an opus 4.8 rewrite over %99 of the time. Unless Fabrice Bellard is rewriting the stuff I need, I'd prefer AI over a human coder.

A human rewrite without maintenance is just a hobby project. An AI rewrite is just wasting tokens for god knows what?