Terence Tao Uses a Coding Agent to Port Two Dozen Java Applets to JS — Agent Finds Bugs He Never Knew About

Terence Tao (via Hacker News)·high signal

In a July 11 post (132 points on HN), Fields Medalist Terence Tao describes using a modern coding agent to port roughly two dozen of his old Java applets to JavaScript in a matter of hours, finding only one minor bug in the output — while the agent surfaced two bugs in his original code he was previously unaware of. He then had it build new visualization tools for special relativity and the Gilbreath conjecture. A concrete primary-source data point on agentic coding for legacy migration from a leading mathematician.