Terence Tao ports two dozen math applets with coding agents

Category: Agentic coding
Status: discussion
Sources: Terence Tao, HN discussion
Summary: Mathematician Terence Tao published a post on 2026-07-11 describing collaborative "vibe coding" sessions with LLM-based coding agents. He ported roughly 24 Java applets from around 1999 (including honeycomb and Besicovitch-set visualizers) to JavaScript, and built new interactive tools such as a special-relativity spacetime diagram and a Gilbreath-conjecture visualization tied to a recent paper. He reports finding only one minor bug across the two dozen ports, that the agent flagged two bugs in the original code, and that each new app took a couple of hours. He frames the downside risk as low because the applets are secondary visual aids, not core research, and labels the output alpha-quality LLM-generated code.
Comments: The front-page thread (249 points) treats it as a notable data point on agent capability from a preeminent mathematician, with the low bug count and the low-stakes framing (educational visual aids, human-reviewed) drawing the most attention.
Why it matters: It is a concrete, named practitioner account of using coding agents to modernize legacy software and build research-adjacent tooling at low review cost, a signal on where agent-assisted coding is landing for expert users.