That’s a very good point. AI works best if it has access to a good feedback cycle – funnily enough that’s also useful to us humans – so a testsuite, which can at the same time run against both systems is great when porting from a to b.
LostKobrakai
mikesax
Yeah, the AI did a great job explaining how the Rails app works and is structured. Regarding tests, I think I’d rather spend that time writing good tests for the Elixir version, but I see how it could be useful.
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mikesax
Thanks for sharing that, and wow, that was quite an upgrade! So far, the more automated approaches have not worked very well, and I am much more comfortable using the AI to present what’s in the Rails app in a more summarized form the the Rails source code. I can then use that to instruct the AI to make a new model etc. and do a bunch of work for me, but in chunks that allow me to carefully review everything and essentially save some typing.
When it comes to writing code or fixing bugs, I feel that agents today, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc. definitely feels like a reckless new developer with the personality of a bullshitter, so I feel the need to keep a close watch. But in terms of analyzing things, explaining, finding stuff on the web, I’ve been very pleased with their work.
I have been keeping the summary documents in a separate folder, but I really like the idea of seeing UPGRADE.md in a project folder, so it is right there with the source history.
I also decided to use Ash (thanks for the extra nudge, @dimitarvp!) and I am happy with that decision. The biggest hurdle (so far!) was Ash Authentication. I like to really control the onboarding experience (the user’s first impression is super important, I think) and I didn’t like the default UI but it was tricky to figure out how to implement custom UI elegantly.
Thanks everyone for all the amazing sharing! It has been super helpful and I will keep sharing the journey here.
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