I built my latest side project (a Wasm to Go "transpiler") precisely as a way to push the limits of what I could do with an LLM/agent.
It sped me up (and genuinely helped with some ideas) but not 10x.
The bits I didn't design myself I definitely needed to inspect and improve before the ever eager busy beaver drove them to the ground.
That said, I'm definitely impressed by how a frontier model can "reason" about Go code that's building an AST to generate other Go code, and clearly separate what's available at generation time vs. at runtime. There's some sophistication there, and I found myself telling them often "this is the kind of code I want to generate, build the AST."
I also appreciated how faster models are good enough at slightly fuzzy find and replace. Like I need to do this refactor, I did two samples of it here, can you do these other 400? I have these test cases in language X, converted 2, can you do the other 100? Even these simple things saved me a lot of time.
In return I got something that can translate SQLite compiled to Wasm into 500k lines of Go in about a month of my spare time.
It sped me up (and genuinely helped with some ideas) but not 10x.
The bits I didn't design myself I definitely needed to inspect and improve before the ever eager busy beaver drove them to the ground.
That said, I'm definitely impressed by how a frontier model can "reason" about Go code that's building an AST to generate other Go code, and clearly separate what's available at generation time vs. at runtime. There's some sophistication there, and I found myself telling them often "this is the kind of code I want to generate, build the AST."
I also appreciated how faster models are good enough at slightly fuzzy find and replace. Like I need to do this refactor, I did two samples of it here, can you do these other 400? I have these test cases in language X, converted 2, can you do the other 100? Even these simple things saved me a lot of time.
In return I got something that can translate SQLite compiled to Wasm into 500k lines of Go in about a month of my spare time.
https://github.com/ncruces/wasm2go