TItimschmidt·Aug 30, 2025
I'm laughing too, that code is 13 years old, committed by hurzl here: https://github.com/timschmidt/repsnapper/commit/5410b5d278a5... and in C++. To be clear, I'd handed off maintainership at least a decade ago. I haven't touched this software in many years. Just noticed the reply.
So this doesn't seem relevant to the conversation about LLMs, Rust, and software quality improvement methods from strict typing to formal verification. It's like a "gotcha!" that didn't land. Sorry.
Please, find some bugs in a project I've touched in the last few years! Looking for things to fix. Please open a github issue from an account linked to your projects next time so I can return the favor :D The bugs are in there, I know they are, but with an LLM and a bit of time to review it's work, it now costs me a few minutes tops to write a test to exclud
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e future cases of the same problem or class of problems. Which is a level of verification beyond what's been allocated time in previous projects, where the tests never got written or very infrequently.
Repsnapper's a great example of that. We didn't have a standardized testing framework we were using across the dozen or so libraries we'd integrated into the app. The original author Kulitorum sort of copied and pasted bits and pieces of code together to write the app originally, without much concern for licenses or origin tracking, so I initiated a line-by-line audit and license verification for the codebase in order to qualify it for inclusion in Fedora and Debian to make 3D printing easier and more available as there were no printing tools shipping in a distro at the time. Integrating new libraries into that codebase was unpleasant, working with the build system in general was not my favorite. Lots of room to screw it up, but it has to be just right to work. I think having llms and a testing framework would have allowed us to evolve the Repsnapper code a lot more safely, and a lot further than we ever managed.
Well, and I can say that pretty safely now that I'm in the process of doing just that with https://github.com/timschmidt/alumina-firmware and https://github.com/timschmidt/alumina-ui and https://github.com/timschmidt/csgrs
They're all still very young, still some things stubbed out, code is gross pending revision and cleanup, but it's basically Repsnapper 3.0 in Rust but this version includes CAD and a motion control firmware and fits in < 4mb. Among them I already have hundreds of tests entirely absent from Repsnapper. Couldn't have written csgrs without them. Probably a lot of redundant tests at this point, as things have changed rapidly. I'm only about 6mo of effort in.