"I also wanted to build a LOT of unit tests, integration tests, and static validation. From a bit of prior experience I found that this is where AI tooling really shines, and it can write tests with far more patience that I ever could. This lets it build up a large hoard of regression and correctness tests that help when I want to implement more things later and the codebase grows."
The tests it writes in my experience are extremely terrible, even with verbose descriptions of what they should do. Every single test I've ever written with an LLM I've had to modify manually to adjust it or straight up redo it. This was as recent as a couple months ago for a C# MAUI project, doing playwright-style UI-based functionality testing.
I'm not sure your AST idea would work for my scenario. I'd be wanting to convert XNA game-play code to PhaserJS. It wouldn't even be close to 95% similar. Several things done manually in XNA would just be automated away with PhaserJS built-ins.
Ya I could see where framework patterns and stuff will need a lot of corrections in post after that type of migration. For mine it was the other direction and only the server portion (Express server written in typescript for a Phaser game, and porting to Kestrel on C#, which was able to use pretty much identical code and at the end after it was done I just switch and refactor ba few things to make it more idiomatic C#).
For the tests, I'm not sure why we have such different results but essentially it took a codebase I had no tests in, and in the port it one shot a ton of tests that have already helped me in adding new features. My game server for it runs in kubernetes and has a "auto-distribute" system that matches players to servers and redistributes them if one server is taken offline. The integration tests it wrote for testing that auto-distribute system found a legit race condition that was there in both the old and new code (it migrated it accurately enough that it had the same bugs) and as part of implementing that test it fixed the bug.
Of course I wouldn't use it if it wasn't a good tool but for me the difference between doing this port via this method versus doing it manually in prior massive projects was such an insane time save that I would have been crazy to do it any other way. I'm super happy with the new code and after also getting the test infra and stuff like that up it's honestly a huge upgrade from my original code that I thought I had so painstakingly crafted.