I translated DOOM from C to Rust in 23 seconds, then used AI for what it is good at

I needed to move a C program to Rust. My first instinct was the easy one: hand it to a model, chunk by chunk, and review the output.

Then I checked whether a tool already existed. c2rust, from Immunant, does exactly this. On the 73,095 lines of doomgeneric it took 23.2 seconds.

The interesting part is not the speed. It is that the model still ended up doing real work, just nowhere near the translation.

Cost was not the argument, and pretending otherwise would be selling smoke

I measured the token cost of translating DOOM with a model using the o200k_base tokenizer: 550,595 input tokens and 1,896,319 output. That is a few dollars. It is not a reason.