LLMs are porting whole codebases, and the bill is real
A port of the TypeScript compiler, checker and LSP to Rust, written by LLM, hit the front page (50000676). A commenter asked, 'Wait, you spent north of $400,000?' A TypeScript team member said three such ports had appeared in one week. The author's 'Slop Line' convention, marking everything below it as LLM-written, was singled out for praise. Elsewhere, classic demoscene productions now run natively in the browser via emulator traces translated to C (50002426), and a commenter says Claude ported old strategy games almost on its own.
Porting is the ideal LLM task. There is a reference implementation and a test suite, so the machine can check itself against ground truth. That makes it the clearest place where agents already deliver at scale.
The cost and the emotional reaction are the counterweights. One comment on the demoscene thread said it made them sad, because the scene was about human ingenuity squeezing a machine, and an agent now does it with a prompt.
So what?
Migrations and rewrites with strong test suites are now a viable agent product, so competitors can rewrite your moat in a different language. Disclose clearly which parts are machine-written, because that honesty is earning goodwill. Budget real money for runs like this, since six figures is now a normal line item.