Egregoros

@sickburnbro LLMs are really good at turning working code into other working code, especially with sufficient testing which with working code can include feeding it the same inputs to see if it gets the same outputs. This is actually significantly easier than creating code from scratch.

hardest hit: proprietary blobs (the objdump'd binary is also "working code"), legacy sunk-cost systems, and companies that fired all the devs 10 ten years ago and have been just milking the cow until it dies off, since.

@sickburnbro COBOL's attention-getting but most of software is like this. There's are also huge Java codebases and legacy Ruby-on-Rails systems. There are companies running 20-year-old Perl programs with 20-year-old backdoors. There's incredible amounts of investment in Python which is all much slower and much harder to maintain because it's in Python. There's JS and C++ where even the people advancing the language can barely contain their contempt when talking about it. Banks have paleolithic software that can't be touched because any upgrade would need to replicate all of the bugs exactly.

Everyone's working with some software he wish he could rewrite.

@sickburnbro @apropos Hah! Rust. I know nothing about Rust other than Torvalds' takedown of the asshole who was being an asshole about something not being done in Rust. "You are the reason I won't use Rust." Paraphrased.

I recall a dev manager at one tech company I worked at saying he wanted everything written in one language rewritten in his preferred language because the former was not an 'enterprise' language. Yet everything I had been taught up to that point, which has some merit, is that you do not rewrite identical functionality in another language just for the sake of using the latter language. You can age it out over time, sure, but you get zero net gain if you do it all up front, and lose valuable time.

It's a cult, I tell ya.