Discussion
Earlier this year, stories of individual engineers using AI to rewrite massive codebases were rumors inside Big Tech.
Now Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Stephen Toub has shared how he used AI agents to rewrite 430K lines of GitHub Copilot from TypeScript to Rust.
14 weeks elapsed. ~$120K in AI tokens. ~3 weeks of his time.
He estimates it would previously have taken a team 1–2 years.
@chadgeidel Technical debt and hindsight following years of production usage are often good reasons to rewrite a system.
However this has been historically quite costly so it’s rarely done. Now it is relatively cheap and we will see this increasingly becoming an option over time.
@carnage4life I wonder what the $20/mo guy version of this would look like .. maybe what I'm doing dinking around polishing my home network. Or maybe I should look for something bigger ..
@carnage4life I haven’t watched the video yet, so apologies if this is answered, but with all these AI rewrites is there any reason given to answer why the codebases need to be rewritten? I understand that there are some that do, but Chesterton’s Fence applies in these cases.