[robot-wrangler]

> How would we measure the effects of AI coding tool taking over manual coding ?

Instead of asking "where are the AI-generated projects" we could ask about the easier problem of "where are the AI-generated ports". Why is it still hard to take an existing fully concrete specification, and an existing test suite, and dump out a working feature-complete port of huge, old, and popular projects? Lots of stuff like this will even be in the training set, so the fact that this isn't easy yet must mean something.

According to claude, wordpress is still 43% of all the websites on the internet and PHP has been despised by many people for many years and many reasons. Why no python or ruby portage? Harder but similar, throw in drupal, mediawiki, and wonder when can we automatically port the linux kernel to rust, etc.

[simonw]

> Why is it still hard to take an existing fully concrete specification, and an existing test suite, and dump out a working feature-complete port of huge, old, and popular projects? Lots of stuff like this will even be in the training

We have a smaller version of that ability already:

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/

See also https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/01/08/a-software-library-with-...

I need to write these up properly, but I pulled a similar trick with an existing JavaScript test suite for https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript and the official WebAssembly test suite for https://github.com/simonw/pwasm

[robot-wrangler]

So extrapolating from here and assuming applications are as easy as libraries, operating systems are as easy as applications.. at this rate with a few people in a weekend you can convert anything to anything else, and the differences between different programming languages are very nearly effectively erased. Nice!

And yet it doesn't feel true yet, otherwise we'd see it. Why do you think that is?