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Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

原网页

Article URL: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/07/11/old-and-new-apps-via-modern-coding-agents/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48880170

Points: 350

# Comments: 99

Hacker News 讨论

352 points · 101 comments · 查看原帖

  1. recursivedoubts

    Building visualizations with LLMs has been a major boost for my CS classes: https://htmx.org/essays/universities-and-ai/#demos-visualiza... Many visualizations that I have always wanted but just didn't have the time to build, I now have. To give an example, I wanted a simplified 8-bit computer to complement the 16-bit teaching computer I use and designed this in a few days with the help of claude: https://bdp.cs.montana.edu/

  2. luciana1u

    Terry Tao using coding agents to build apps means we're one step away from a Fields Medalist asking an LLM why his Docker container won't start, just like the rest of us.

  3. semiquaver

    There is infinite latent demand for software, most especially outside the traditionally software-focused spaces. If LLMs stopped improving today it would take us 10 years to catch up to the new software-writing abilities that have become available. This is a great illustration of that fact.

  4. wffurr

    Nice balanced perspective there at the end: "as such [LLM-coded interactive] supplements are not mission-critical to the core of the paper, I again feel that the downside risk of using guided interaction with LLM agents to generate such visualizations is acceptable." It's a tool. Good for some things but not others and generally not to be trusted.

  5. luciana1u

    Terry Tao using coding agents feels like watching a Michelin-starred chef discover microwave dinners and get genuinely excited about them.

  6. npalli

    I laughed at this "but the code complexity became too much for me, and I abandoned the project." even Terry Tao finds some code too complex to write. Really bullish on LLMs expanding code development by a very large group of people who are really smart in some domain but could not get into 'coding'.

  7. apignotti

    Running legacy educational Java applets, especially around math and physics, has been a longstanding popular use case of our CheerpJ Applet Runner extension, running Java bytecode in the browser via WebAssembly. I am not sure how to feel about agents solving the problem via proper modernization. It's certainly positive that students will be able to interact with this content in a modern and more accessible way, but the educational use case for our product, although not commercially important, has always been a source of pride. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cheerpj-applet-runn...

  8. alansaber

    I always enjoy these "domain expert has fun using AI to do something in their domain" articles. But it's always a hobby project, never something serious.