People may think it’s an overstatement. But I think it’s not.

This kind of projects are where AI is most helpful. Long tedious and highly testable projects like ports or legacy system replacements where humans have to grind through millions of lines of code without really thinking are the perfect target for AI.

I once did a C to C# port of several math libraries, and while I was able to automate most of it, it still required a ton of manual work. I bet if I had Claude, I could do what I did in 3 months in a day or two.

This is what I was thinking too. Ports are probably where AI has the one of the biggest time savings over humans.

Although also agree, that even if human's did it, they probably would try to automate as much as possible and speed up development, and maybe that original 5 year estimate was if it was done completely manually.