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Comment by vb-8448 | Hacker News Reader

A full implementation/rewrite of something like word, which is pretty complex and the quantity of edge cases is insane, in a relatively short amount of time, months, is very hard.

If they succeed with AI it will be huge: it's basically not possible to do it today with humans, no matter how many people you put on the job.

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I would agree a full rewrite of word which is very complex and take quite a bit of time.

It would be impressive of AI to make a 80% rewrite, though I fully doubt it would cover the 100% rewrite (disregarding long term support as well).

Why do you think it’s impossible for humans to rewrite word, especially even humans made it in the first place?

I think it's not possible with humans in a relatively SHORT amount of time (let's say 1 year).

I’m not sure about you but I would not want to adopt and ship an overnight “word” written in rust

Me neither, but this is exactly my point: nowadays, no one will trust an "overnight word written in rust", unless someone prove that an "overnight word written in rust" is good enough.

And big AI LABs, with basically infinite tokens, are the only one in the position to do it.

Even then, I would not trust an AI lab as Microsoft does have a long history of support for word whereas I’m not sure the level of continued support from AI labs. *support including bug fixes, vulnerabilities, continued user testing, interop with other services, standards, etc

Right now even OpenAI has its own copy of Overleaf (for latex). I’m not in the same circles as it’s intended users, though I haven’t heard any major use of it since the splash.

I'm not talking about that, but existing utility tools (in Rust) that can generate MS document format. Perhaps not perfect, but these work today.

I wouldn’t imagine recreating Apache poi would be a terrible reach for a human let alone a llm.

Anything beyond basic utilities though I have a slightly harder time seeing.

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