AI is especially good at ports like this where there’s a known and well tested surface area.

"ports like this" skips the part about Microsoft/enterprise software having a known and well tested surface area, the few examples we've seen are exceptional cases I suspect

*that only microsoft has access to.

These guys puposely obscure controls and understanding of these products 100% to prevent you doing a port.

Just go open a microsoft word doc in the browser and look at the dom.

Despair! Horror!

Especially when there are three different versions, and each has a different team, and they all can work together at the same time. Crazy amount of tech supporting it that breaks a humans context let alone a models context.

Yeah that's by far the most complex part.

Ever letter is it's own object and they stitch it into the visual view. When you type one letter is turns a single word into multiple objects all versioned objects.

Can't imagine all the crazy race condition protections baked into that.

But in case they succeed the return on image will be astonishing.

Can you expand upon this?

A full implementation/rewrite of something like word, which is pretty complex and the quantity of edge cases is insane, in a relatively short amount of time, months, is very hard.

If they succeed with AI it will be huge: it's basically not possible to do it today with humans, no matter how many people you put on the job.

I would agree a full rewrite of word which is very complex and take quite a bit of time.

It would be impressive of AI to make a 80% rewrite, though I fully doubt it would cover the 100% rewrite (disregarding long term support as well).

Why do you think it’s impossible for humans to rewrite word, especially even humans made it in the first place?

I think it's not possible with humans in a relatively SHORT amount of time (let's say 1 year).

I’m not sure about you but I would not want to adopt and ship an overnight “word” written in rust

Me neither, but this is exactly my point: nowadays, no one will trust an "overnight word written in rust", unless someone prove that an "overnight word written in rust" is good enough.

And big AI LABs, with basically infinite tokens, are the only one in the position to do it.

Even then, I would not trust an AI lab as Microsoft does have a long history of support for word whereas I’m not sure the level of continued support from AI labs. *support including bug fixes, vulnerabilities, continued user testing, interop with other services, standards, etc

Right now even OpenAI has its own copy of Overleaf (for latex). I’m not in the same circles as it’s intended users, though I haven’t heard any major use of it since the splash.

I'm not talking about that, but existing utility tools (in Rust) that can generate MS document format. Perhaps not perfect, but these work today.

I wouldn’t imagine recreating Apache poi would be a terrible reach for a human let alone a llm.

Anything beyond basic utilities though I have a slightly harder time seeing.

I mean, aside from all the NP Hard sub problems (I might not be reading your satire though), the real hard problem is that a "product" is not just software, but an ecosystem and a promise of maintenance of the abstract user experience & quality of it.