I converted Merchants' Village from Rebol to Flask, using Fable.

Started by Nick on 2026-07-18 18:04:08
This week, I converted the Merchants' Village software from Rebol to Flask, using Fable. It only took a few prompts. I did it using Deb's $20 per month Claude account, so had to wait for rate limits to pass every few hours, which spread the conversion across a couple casual days. I did a few revisions after testing Fable's, but for the most part, that model just understood all the details of the Rebol code, and handled everything expertly. I even converted a big revision of the Merchants' Village software, which I created for a client around 2015. It took Fable only a single additional pass to complete that version too, which in the past encompassed many weeks of hard work. The one thing I notice now is how much dramatically simpler the entire Merchants' Village project was, than project requirements I complete every day with GPT and other LLMs. It's not at all unusual to complete more than 100x the work, for production deployment in mission critical environments, using GPT, in a single day, than I could have completed with Rebol in weeks - I'm quite literally hundreds to thousands of times more productive these days, using GPT and other models to write code, and I experience none of the stress, fatigue, or pain that was involved in extremely challenging projects in the past. That 100-1000x increase in productivity is basically effortless. It's more challenging for me to get solid requirements from clients these days - but even a significant portion of that communication and time-consuming work is handled largely by LLMs in my daily workflows. What an eye-opening comparison.
I'm working on converting the R3 Android code, with R3 View, which I commissioned back in the 20-teens, to run in Web Assembly. Free use of Fable in Claude Pro accounts runs out tomorrow, so I'm not sure if this project will get done but it'll be interesting to see how well this conversion goes initially. I would have paid tens of thousands of dollars in the past to get this sort of work done ;)

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