Id put it as a example of a carpenter preparing their material with a lathe and circular saw vs one working with a handsaw and chisel.

Both will get a skilled craftsman to the point where thie output is a quality piece of work. Using the autotoools to prepare the inputs allows velocity and consistency.

Main issue is the hype and skiddies who would say - feed this tree into a machine and get a cabinet.Producing non-detrministic outputs with the operator being unable to adjust requirements on the fly or even stray from patterns/designs that havent been trained yet.

The tools have limitiations and the operators as well , and the hype does adisservice to what would be establishing reasonable patterns of usage and best practices.

Right. I had a 100% manual hobby project that did a load of parametric CAD in Python. The problem with sharing this was either actively running a server, trying to port the stack to emscripten including OCCT, or rewriting in JS, something I am only vaguely experienced in.

In ~5 hours of prompting, coding, testing, tweaking, the STL outputs are 1:1 (having the original is essential for this) and it runs entirely locally once the browser has loaded.

I don’t pretend that I’m a frontend developer now but it’s the sort of thing that would have taken me at least days, probably longer if I took the time to learn how each piece worked/fitted together.

Yeah, it also a lot that the person doing the translation is the lead developer of the project who is very familiar with the original version.

I imagine LLMs do help quite a bit for these language translation tasks though. Language translation (both human and programming) is one of the things they seem to be best at.

Agreed, however, I'm quite sure 25,000 lines translated in "multiple months" is very "slow", for a naive translation between languages as similar as C++ and Rust.

2000+ lines/day chunks are 10 days for 20+k lines...

Dunno, that probably doesn't hold for webapps with backend as they are typically complete garbage and LLMs (even local ones) would give you about the same result but in 1 hour.

Rather like opening a box of legos and reading them the instruction sheet while they auto assemble based on what they understood. Then you re-read and clarify where the assembly went wrong. Many times, if needed.

They were doing their own custom language before Swift.

Hate to tell you this, but it's cults all the way down. Plato understood this, and his disdain for caves and wall-shadows, is really a disdain for cults. The thing is, over the last 2300 years, we have gotten really good at making our caves super cozy -- much cozier than the "real world" could ever be. Our wall-shadows have become theme parks, broadway theaters, VR headsets, youtube videos, books, entire cities even. In Plato's day, it made sense to question the cave, to be suspicious of it. But today, the cave is not just at parity with reality, it is superior to it (similar to how a video game is a precisely engineered experience, one that never has too little signal and never has too much noise, the perfect balance to keep you interested and engaged).

I'm no mind reader, and certainly no anthropologist, but I suspect that what separates humans from other (non extinct) animals, is that we compulsively seek caves that we can decorate with moving shadows and static symbols. We even found a series of prime numbers (sequences of dots, ". ... ..... .......") in a cave from the _ice age_. Mathematics before writing. We seek to project what we see with our mind's eye into the world itself, thereby making it communicable, shareable. Ever tell someone you had a dream, and they believed you? You just planted the seed for a cult, a shared cave. Even though you cannot photograph the dream, or offer any evidence that you can dream at all.

The industrial and scientific revolutions have distanced our consciousness from this idea, even as they enabled ever more perfect caves to manifest. Our vocabulary has become corrupted and unclear. We started using words like "reality", and "literally", and "truth", when we mean the exact opposite.

The conspiracy theorists and cultists, are just people who wandered into a new cave, with a different kind of fire, and differently curved walls, and they want to tell people from their old cave that they have found a way out of the cave into reality -- they do not yet realize (or do not want to accept), that they live in a network of caves, a network of different things in the same category.

During the early 2020s, we did a lot of talking about the disappearance of "consensus reality". This is scientific terminology mapped over the idea of caves and cults. You can tell, because the phrase is an oxymoron. It is not reality, if it requires consensus. It is fantasy, it is fiction, it is a dream. The cave has indeed become so widespread that we even _call_ it reality.

If you speak language, and read words, you are participating in a cult (we even call caves that had a kind of altar in the center a cult -- in Eurasia, there was a cave-cult called _the cult of the bear_, which had a bear skull placed in its center during the last ice age, and I would not be surprised if people spoke to it, with the help of hallucinogens). The only question is whether the cult is nourishing you or cannibalizing you.

To the person you are responding to (user ocd): your cave (ladybird, your hypothetical tv-series), no longer nourishes you like it once did. Maybe find a new cave, build a fire in it. Unlike a television series, you can fork a code base. You make it into the perfect cave, just for you. And if another person likes this cave, chooses to sit by the fire with you, well, now you have a cult.