C is Brittle D is Plastic

[Lance Bachmeier]

On Sunday, 22 March 2026 at 17:19:26 UTC, Derek Fawcus wrote:

> However going back to the original point, as of late last year 
> / early this year it is now obsolete.  That specific example of 
> switching the code to use . or -> is something which the LLM 
> assisted coding agents are particularly adept at.
>
> Such refactoring tasks are what I've been using it for, where 
> it is quite easy to specify some form of grep pattern and then 
> rules to update the code.  So these days that'll take less than 
> an hour to achieve.

If that's the standard (unlimited time and resources) then it was 
never really a thing. You could have always hired someone to make 
the changes for you. There's really no reason to use high-level 
programming languages at all if you're willing to make those 
assumptions.