| Not to take away from your experience but to offer a counterpoint. I used claude code to port rust pdb parsing library to typescript. My SumatraPDF is a large C++ app and I wanted visibility into where does the size of functions / data go, layout of classes. So I wanted to build a tool to dump info out of a PDB. But I have been diagnosed with extreme case of Rustophobiatis so I just can't touch rust code. Hence, the port to typescript. With my assistance it did the work in an afternoon and did it well. The code worked. I ran it against large PDB from SumatraPDF and it matched the output of other tools. In a way porting from one language to another is extreme case of refactoring and Claude did it very well. I think that in general (your experience notwithstanding) Claude Caude is excellent at refactorings. Here are 3 refactorings from SumatraPDF where I asked claude code to simplify code written by a human: https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/a472d3...
https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/5624aa...
https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/a40bc9... I hope you agree the code written by Claude is better than the code written by a human. Granted, those are small changes but I think it generalizes into bigger changes. I have few refactorings in mind I wanted to do for a long time and maybe with Claude they will finally be feasible (they were not feasible before only because I don't have infinite amount of time to do everything I want to do). |
Translating a vibe is something the Ur-LLMS (GPT3 etc) were very good at so it’s not entirely surprising that the current state of the art is to be found in things of a “translate thing X that already exists into context Y” nature.