barf

I’ve been maintaining a software project for couple of years as a freelancer. I took over the maintainance from some other guys who did great a job.

However I felt like I was somewhat stuck in place. Multiple packages had not been updated for many years, some npm package not being maintained. I was in this constant limbo of adding new features or should I try to update packages.

I tried a few times to update few packages and it worked, but sooner or later I ran into dependency conflicts and bigger updates were needed.

Here came a LLM to my rescue!

I could ask it to refactor the code for me, update the packages and even write tests for it.

It was much quicker than doing it manually. I powered through the whole codebase in couple of weeks.

I even managed to update build tool to vite after updating all the packages.

This would have taken me months to do manually.

As you can see this, refactor was 146 commits, I commited every time I updated a pacakage or refactored a file.

I changed 336 files. Some had minor changes, other major changes. Some of it was a part of this new vite setup

As you can see, I managed to remove a lot of lines of code.

I think the biggest win was removing all use of styled components and replaced it with Chakra UI.

Chakra UI was already used widely in the codebase so it made sense to use a single styling system.

These Large Language Models are great for tasks like this. I did not expect to be so productive with this refactor.

There are multiple sources on what are good ways to leverage these models.

I simply gave it my package.json and asked for a todo list to upgrade packages or find a replacement.

After that it was a quick feedback loop of telling it upgrade and test, see if things worked, and if they did, commit to git 🤖