> Reading the code and actually understanding the code is not that the same thing.
Ok. Let me be more specific then. I'm "understanding" the code since that's the point.
> I'm unsure the AI can do the high level understanding since I have never gotten it to produce said understanding without explicitly telling it.
My experience has been the opposite: it often starts by producing a usable high-level description of what the code is doing (sometimes imperfectly) and then proposes refactors that match common patterns -- especially if you give it enough context and let it iterate.
> "Rewrite x.c, y.c, z.c into C++ buildings abstractions to make it more ergonomic" generally won't recognise the DSL and formalise it in a way that is very easy to do in C++, it will just make it "C++" but the same convoluted structure exists.
That can happen if you ask for a mechanical translation or if the prompt doesn't encourage redesign. My point was literally make it well-designed idiomatic C++ and it did that. Inside of the LLM training is a whole bunch of C++ code and it seems to be leaning on that.
I did direct some goals (e.g., separating device-specific code and configuration into separate classes so adding a device means adding a class instead of sprinkling if statements everywhere). But it also made independent structural improvements: it split out data generation vs file generation into pipeline/stream-like components and did strict separation of dependencies. It's actually well designed for unit testing and mocking even though I didn't tell it I wanted that.
I'm not claiming it has human-level understanding or that it never makes mistakes -- but "it can't do high-level understanding" doesn't match what I'm seeing in practice. At minimum, it can infer the shape of the application well enough to propose and implement a much more ergonomic architecture, especially with iterative guidance.
I had to have it introduce some "bugs" for byte-for-byte matching because it had generalized some of the file generation and the original C code generated slightly different file structures for different devices. There's no reason for this difference; it's just different code trying to do the same thing. I'll probably remove these differences when the whole thing is done.