Gabriele SveltoI've seen people claiming - with a straight face - that mechanical refactoring is a good use-case for LLM-based tools. Well, sed was developed in 1974 and - according to Wikipedia - first shipped in UNIX version 7 in 1979. On modern machines it can process files at speeds of several GB/s and will not randomly introduce errors while processing them. It doesn't cost billions, a subscription or internet access. It's there on your machine, fully documented. What are we even talking about?
adingbatponder 
👾@gabrielesvelto For fun I tried writing rust code with claude code. The code took an age to compile when it worked (do we call it build?). The project took months and so the code got large & was slow to build. Claude was able to refactor it (after it worked) to build 10 times faster. That is not mechanical as you mention... but was really challenging. Mechanical refactors it does 100 times better still of course, because it seds too yes, but it can check the new syntax & test build each change.
@adingbatponder why did the project take so long to build?
@gabrielesvelto Well that is what rust seems to be like. I used a lot of packages incl. browser and screen grabbing tools which took ages to build. Like 20 mins. (It was inside a nixos flake though.)
@adingbatponder yes, but why? Which packages where taking so long? Firefox has almost 4 millions of lines of Rust and it takes only a few minutes to build them.
@gabrielesvelto No clue. At the time it was chrome that pushed it into silly territory. But this was inside a flake. All I know was when it was refactored it was able to use 32 processors instead of only 2.