alt Hacker NewsIt's actually common for human-written projects to go through an initial R&D phase where the first prototypes turn into spaghetti code and require a full rewrite. I haven't been through this myself with LLMs, but I wonder to what extent they could analyse the codebase, propose and then implement a better architecture based on the initial version.
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If you write that first prototype in Rust, with the idiomatic style of "Rust exploratory code" (lots of defensive .clone()ing to avoid borrowck trouble; pervasive interior mutability; gratuitous use of Rc<> or Arc<> to simplify handling of the objects' lifecycle) that can often be incrementally refactored into a proper implementation. Very hard to do in other languages where you have no fixed boilerplate marking "this is the sloppy part".
Let's be real, a lot of organizations never actually finish that R&D phase, and just continue iterating on their prototypes, and try to untangle the spaghetti for years.
I recently had to rewrite a part of such a prototype that had 15 years of development on it, which was a massive headache. One of the most useful things I used LLMs for was asking it to compare the rewritten functionality with the old one, and find potential differences. While I was busy refactoring and redesigning the underlying architecture, I then sometimes was pinged by the LLM to investigate a potential difference. It sometimes included false positives, but it did help me spot small details that otherwise would have taken quite a while of debugging.