Architecture, Skeleton, Grind, Verify
I'm mid-port on two things right now: a Pascal solver called YASS, going to Rust, for the Sokoban work on tilebasedworlds.com, and BurntSushi's fst crate, going from Rust to Nim, for the search layer behind nlpcitations.com. Different source languages, different target languages, different domains — but the same failure mode kept showing up when I tried to hand either of them to a model in one shot. Paste in a few thousand lines, ask for a port, get back something that compiles and is subtly wrong in ways that take longer to find than writing it yourself would have. The fix wasn't a better prompt. It was splitting the work into stages that don't all deserve the same model.