Ask HN: Are people using Agents to clone/port codebases
Posted by stevehiehn 12 hours ago
TO BE CLEAR: I am not doing this! But, I keep thinking about it. What happens if I give a large codebase to Claude and say "Port the entire project to a different language. Do not use any existing code or class/method signatures. Maintain all functionality, but use alternative architecture where possible" Is this a thing? In theory can people now just rip entire platforms like NBD?
Comments
Comment by wild_egg 10 hours ago
If the project is complex, a key thing is telling it to do a 1:1 migration with full equivalent test coverage, following TDD best practices. That gives it the right structure to reliably test its own work and the results are consistently solid.
Comment by ChrisArchitect 12 hours ago
I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in hours