Topic
Using AI coding agents to port or rewrite software between languages, frameworks, or libraries, with mixed accuracy and fidelity results.
Shopify's Helix ports its 300-plus-screen app off React Native in small LLM-built checkpoints, each held behind four gates. The design assumes the model's first attempt is wrong, so most of the adoption cost sits in test harnesses and a written architecture.
Reality
Jarred Sumner's four-month rewrite checked transpiled Rust against a TypeScript suite that does not depend on the implementation language, and reaching a fully passing run cost about $165,000 in tokens.
Reality
WatchMe's Electron bundle measured 289 MB before its port to Tauri 2. The saving comes entirely from deleting a bundled Chromium, and it transfers only to an app whose interface can accept whatever the system webview draws.
Reality
The fivefold cut in time to first mitigation is the number Salesforce leads with. The more useful detail is what its team refused to write itself with three months left on the old platform's licenses.
Reality
The two-week Enzyme removal is credible enough, but it is priced against a five-year staffing plan written by people who did not want the project, and Airbnb's published numbers let you check the rate that plan assumed.
Reality
A licence change moved bugfixes behind an application-only community licence. Pay, fork, or rewrite: one practitioner ran the fork's migration tool and reported what it left behind.
Reality