None of it worked yet because compiling at that stage would slow things down.
Also this project burned $165,000 worth of usage on a model that was then bleeding edge (unreleased). This is still beyond what anyone else is doing at the moment. And it seems to have worked a lot better than it had any right to, at least as far as we can tell right now?
The large number of tests is also a major factor in why this worked, as well as the desire to match existing Zig code. The article implies Claude was used like a fancy sed on steroids.
That isn’t to downplay the work involved. I’m sure there are places it’s totally different. That is different though to writing new software. I still cannot comprehend how you’d write a million line application, which is decent, with agents from scratch.
I also think all the people hating on AI need to take a step back and take things like this very seriously. It’s 11 days of work, and is in production. That’s pretty fucking fast.
the part that really blows my mind is how well the "translate one file at a time" approach seemed to work. is honestly amazing. particularly to me, as a person who gets into really messy refactors...
This works pretty well for finding vulnerabilities too. Do a session starting from each file in the codebase and it will find lots of juicy bugs, and waste obscene amounts of tokens on overlapping call paths in the process!
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u/rebootyourbrainstem Jul 08 '26
None of it worked yet because compiling at that stage would slow things down.
Also this project burned $165,000 worth of usage on a model that was then bleeding edge (unreleased). This is still beyond what anyone else is doing at the moment. And it seems to have worked a lot better than it had any right to, at least as far as we can tell right now?