loading . . . A little controversy This is going to be controversial, so I would ask you to reserve judgement until the end of this post (with the average internet crowd, such an appeal would be pointless, but people who read this blog are usually familiar with the NPOV concept, so I have hope).
I have been writing code for over 40 years. I have worked in the usual (and some unusual) programming languages. I can work “full stack”. I wrote the original version of MediaWiki during a semester holiday 25 years ago, and I have been writing MediaWiki-related code ever since. This is not to brag, but to set the stage.
With over 350 tools juggled in the air as a hobby, I find that I can keep the big ones running, and occasionally I find time for a new one, or a rewrite. But all of that code is technical debt, and it’s slowly rotting away. And while my tools usually work, they are often written organically, growing into strange shapes as time passes and features are added.
That makes most of my tools difficult to maintain, even for me. Passing a tool to someone else to take care of is… difficult at best.
I had looked into LLMs (mostly ChatGPT at the time) for coding when it first came into fashion, so to speak, but the results were spurious and, frankly, unacceptable. Then, about half a year ago, I played around with Claude Opus again, and it was… better. Around the same time, I was notified that one of my oldest tools, “geohack”, was exhausting its assigned Toolforge resources. As many of you know, I like to experiment, so I told it to rewrite the PHP codebase in Rust (_vibe-transpiling_?). The result was astonishing. Even though I told it in no uncertain terms to reproduce all details of the original code, I would never have expected it to spit out an essentially feature-complete, fully working version.
Yes, I am quite capable of doing this work myself. For example, I have previously rewritten CatScan (PHP) into PetScan (C++) into PetScan (Rust). But to do that, I would have had to drop other things, for quite a while. And it would have been quite tedious. This way, I had it done in an afternoon. Was the code good? Kinda. But I was very specific about sacrificing style for faithful reproduction of functionality, so that’s OK. I could probably outsource part of it to an existing Rust crate. But it works well as it is, much better than the original.
Finally, there was hope for me to get my tools at least to a maintainable level. I started asking Claude to refactor, write tests, find bugs (and it did, including potentially security-relevant ones), move the codebase towards SOLID and DRY principles, reduce cognitive complexity, use best practices and language standards — all things you would want for your code. I did this with Rust codebases first, since the stringent but helpful compiler works very well at pushing back against LLM-induced issues, but eventually I expanded into PHP and JavaScript territory.
An incomplete list of things I had Claude help with:
* Moved my repos from Bitbucket to Codeberg, so I had Claude write me a transfer tool for the issue tracker
* Improved various Rust libraries/crates that I use in other tools, e.g. WikiMisc
* Moved whole collections of PHP scripts to PHP 8.4, e.g. magnustools
* Rewrote AutoDesc from PHP and server-side JavaScript to Rust
* The Grand Unification of Mix’n’match PHP → Rust code (and user-supplied code fixes, and interface improvements)
* Updated and harmonized image-related tools
* Harmonized and improved on-Wikidata scripts
* Countless issues closed on many of my project issue trackers, including PetScan, Listeria, and Mix’n’Match
Is that “vibe coding”? I don’t think so (that would be more like “go write a banking app in assembler, YOLO!!1!”), but call it whatever you like. Is the code “slop”? It does have a different “taste” from my own code. It can be a bit verbose. But given the upsides of using LLMs, especially with the directives I put in place (writing tests, SOLID/DRY, etc.), _the codebase as a whole is more accessible_. And with very few, small exceptions, I have never had Claude write a _de novo_ codebase (transpiling from PHP is mostly mechanical, so it doesn’t count in my book), so I am iterating on my own code, and actually reducing lines of code (e.g. merging the Mix’n’match PHP code into the Rust one) that I need to maintain. Of course, new features require new code, but that is true of all coding, and I try not to go overboard.
So am I an “AI” fanboy now? Most certainly not. Likewise, I am not apologetic about using it. It is a technology that has helped me. Using LLMs has improved my tools, both at the code level and in the user experience. That is a win in my book. I would love to have a little box with a copy of Claude (or similar) on my desk as a permanent assistant (usage is not cheap!), but if LLMs get outlawed tomorrow, go bankrupt, or increase prices even more, I will shrug and move on. I’ll be fine without it. At least I got some use out of it while it lasted. http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/archives/828
