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Ask HN: Are people using Agents to clone/port codebases

1 points| stevehiehn | 2 months ago

TO BE CLEAR: I am not doing this! But, I keep thinking about it. What happens if I give a large codebase to Claude and say "Port the entire project to a different language. Do not use any existing code or class/method signatures. Maintain all functionality, but use alternative architecture where possible" Is this a thing? In theory can people now just rip entire platforms like NBD?

2 comments

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wild_egg|2 months ago

I've now done this multiple times with older Claude versions.

If the project is complex, a key thing is telling it to do a 1:1 migration with full equivalent test coverage, following TDD best practices. That gives it the right structure to reliably test its own work and the results are consistently solid.