All ideasMore in Work
Work

Port 430,000 lines of TypeScript to Rust with coding agents

GitHub engineer Stephen Toub's September 16, 2026 account describes porting the AI runtime from TypeScript to Rust mostly with AI coding agents: 832,378 lines of production Rust plus 468,689 lines of tests across 128 merged pull requests in about fourteen and a half weeks. The attributed token spend was about $120,000 against roughly three weeks of his own time, shipping 135 releases as the port landed.

How it works

  1. Scope the port (about 430,000 production TypeScript lines)
  2. Agents port one component per pull request with atomic in-place replacement
  3. Merge 128 PRs to main
  4. Ship 135 releases during the port
  5. Finish at 832,378 lines of production Rust plus 468,689 lines of Rust tests

Why it’s worth knowing

One engineer and a fleet of agents rewrote the engine that runs the agents — 1.3 million lines — while the product kept shipping daily.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on theaugmenteddev.com. See the original ↗

Upgraded prompt

A ready-to-use prompt for this idea, built from research on what makes AI agents do the job right: who the AI should be, the exact steps, and a check to make sure it was done the way you wanted.

1Who the AI should be
2The prompt, with the steps
3The check when it’s done
Upgraded prompts are coming soon.

Try next

WorkFind me 48 school-district customers and draft each pitch — one replied, booked and paidWorkA review engine asked his past customers for reviews and got three five star ones on day oneWorkBuild a custom order-routing app that sends my worst orders to Amazon MCFWorkA text and voice agent worked a realtor's 60,000 old leads and turned up 34 closed deals

Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.