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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Migrating a million lines of code is how many human-engineer-years worth of work? Some quick fermi estimates place it at between 15-100 years depending on how much automated tooling is used (without AI).

It really blows my mind how some AI naysayers like you fail the absolute basic common sense test of comparing the comparable. If you, without AI, merged nineteen regressions in 2 weeks, how much work has actually been done? How many features did you rewrite? How many refactors did you make and how difficult were they?

Insane...

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Without AI, the migration would never have happened. People with stake in the code wouldn't have invested time in it, and would've taken the much more sane and logical route of improving their Zig codebase.

And who put you in charge deciding that improving their zig codebase is the One True Way To Do Things?

Fuck, man, this used to be hacker news, a place where curiosity is rewarded.

Bizarre response. I apparently need to draw attention to the fact that I didn't claim to be in charge of Bun's codebase; I was merely pointing out the obvious conclusion, what would have happened before everyone collectively lost their minds and their focus to the AI craze.

Exactly. My AI used to tell me some human costs of work for this feature. Like 2 months. I told start doing it, and it finished within 2 hours. Insane

It's precisely because I'm not an AI naysayer that I reject the premise of the comparison. My job is not to produce as much code as I possibly can; my job is to produce features that provide value to customers in a high quality and regression-free manner. To accomplish this I use safer AI-enabled development strategies, which produce fewer lines of code and involve more manual review but also do not result in 1 regression per calendar day.

Again, you are comparing things which are not comparable.

"Working on a feature" and "Working on a language-to-language port of 1M LOC" are NOT the same thing.

You're also still bringing up "regression per day", while ignoring the fact that without AI, this would have taken easily ~4000 days. Which is 1 regression per 0.003 calendar day. Not the same.

And you still aren't addressing sibling comments reminding you that these aren't shipped migrations. I'll second the comment asking you whether your code is always perfect first-shot, because if we're going to count those bugs, we might be well above your 1/day number.

No, without AI, it wouldn't have been done, which would have led to exactly zero bugs added by a needless rewrite.

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