There was a period in my previous job when I was enamored with Perl. It is a great scripting language. I was deep enough in the Perl-hole that I wrote an important personal finance script in Perl: A script to convert a GnuCash book into a Ledger file. Ledger is great for analysis, but not the best tool for data entry.
With AI-assisted coding coming on the scene, I did a quick rewrite from Perl to Golang using OpenCode, backed by Claude Code’s Sonnet model. I was planning to do this by hand, it may have taken me months to get to it eventually. The world changes, and one must change with it! Rewriting open source projects which are probably already in the training dataset of the foundational models anyway is a total win-win.
- Merge request: https://gitlab.com/siddharthkannan-in/open-source/gnucash-xml-to-ledger-dat/-/merge_requests/1%5Bfn:1%5D
- Plan generated by OpenCode: https://github.com/icyflame/gnucash-xml-to-ledger-dat/blob/e844680288743fde0b7768c10cf7565c1d46cc65/ai-assisted/sessions/rewrite-in-go/plan.md
- Session with OpenCode: https://github.com/icyflame/gnucash-xml-to-ledger-dat/blob/e844680288743fde0b7768c10cf7565c1d46cc65/ai-assisted/sessions/rewrite-in-go/session.md
I have not merged the rewrite yet because I am still running it locally, verifying the output, and updating the README.
Update: I have merged this MR after a few more minor tweaks and some testing sessions.