“I rewrote Kafka in COBOL”

Oh man, it’s late here and I thought to myself “How would you rewrite a Kafka novel in COBOL?”… 🥴

(In case, anyone actually isn’t aware, they’re talking of Apache Kafka.)

In general, though, yeah, I also find it cumbersome how much noise these toy projects add. Actually usable software involves so much more than just dumping some code into a repo.

Nevermind that even just useful software requires you to not rewrite existing software in a worse way. You need to actually come up with something novel, which requires tons of design decisions.

Letting the LLM auto-complete those is a lot harder, because 1) you need to actually describe design goals rather than just telling it “do it like Kafka”.
And 2) because those design goals will be wrong every so often, and/or the detail decisions that you outsourced to the LLM. And then you still need to painstakingly find out what those detail decisions were, so that you can correct the decision.

only the communities that allow slop.

selfhosted@lemmy.world has fallen victim to this. It’s a shame, it was one of my favourites.

edit: seems it got better lately, so I’m back