[chrismorgan]

> It's not like people just one-shot a whole module of code, why would LLMs?

For conversions between languages or libraries, you often do just one-shot it, writing or modifying code from start to end in order.

I remember 15 years ago taking a 10,000 line Java code base and porting it to JavaScript mostly like this, with only a few areas requiring a bit more involved and non-sequential editing.

[dietr1ch]

I think this shows how the approach LLMs take is wrong. For us it's easy because we simply sort of iterate over every function with a simple prompt of doing a translation, but are yet careful enough taking notes of whatever may be relevant to do a higher level change if necessary.

Maybe the mistake is mistaking LLMs as capable people instead of a simple, but optimised neuron soup tuned for text.

[copperx]

So, you didn't test it until the end? or did you have to build it in such a way that is was partially testable?

[chrismorgan]

One of the nifty things about the target being JavaScript was that I didn’t have to finish it before I could run it—it was the sort of big library where typical code wouldn’t use most of the functionality. It was audio stuff, so there were a couple of core files that needed more careful porting (from whatever in Java to Mozilla’s Audio Data API, which was a fairly good match), and then the rest was fairly routine that could be done gradually, as I needed them or just when I didn’t have anything better to focus on. Honestly, one of the biggest problems was forgetting to prefix instance properties with `this.`