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

1 pointstevehiehn2 comments

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?

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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.

Recently:

I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in hours

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46295771

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