I used claude code to port rust pdb parsing library to typescript.

My SumatraPDF is a large C++ app and I wanted visibility into where does the size of functions / data go, layout of classes. So I wanted to build a tool to dump info out of a PDB. But I have been diagnosed with extreme case of Rustophobiatis so I just can't touch rust code. Hence, the port to typescript.

With my assistance it did the work in an afternoon and did it well. The code worked. I ran it against large PDB from SumatraPDF and it matched the output of other tools.

In a way porting from one language to another is extreme case of refactoring and Claude did it very well.

I think that in general (your experience notwithstanding) Claude Caude is excellent at refactorings.

Here are 3 refactorings from SumatraPDF where I asked claude code to simplify code written by a human:

https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/a472d3... https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/5624aa... https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/a40bc9...

I hope you agree the code written by Claude is better than the code written by a human.

Granted, those are small changes but I think it generalizes into bigger changes. I have few refactorings in mind I wanted to do for a long time and maybe with Claude they will finally be feasible (they were not feasible before only because I don't have infinite amount of time to do everything I want to do).