Terence Tao Vibe-Codes His Way Through a 25-Year Backlog
Terence Tao spent last week vibe coding. In a July 11 post that topped Hacker News today at nearly 400 points, the Fields medalist describes handing modern coding agents the roughly two dozen Java applets he wrote back in 1999 — interactive math visualizations that stopped running when browsers killed Java — and getting working JavaScript versions back within hours. Best detail: while porting, the agent found two bugs in his original 1999 code, and introduced only one minor issue of its own.
Then came the part that matters more than the ports. Tao built the things he never got to: a spacetime diagram tool for special relativity he had abandoned as too much work 25 years ago, and a new interactive visualization of the Gilbreath conjecture. Projects that sat dead for a quarter century because implementation cost more than a working mathematician could justify — cleared in an afternoon of conversation.
This is the cleanest 100X datapoint you will see, precisely because there is no benchmark attached. The bottleneck for the world's best mathematician was never mathematical ability; it was the implementation tax on every idea. Agents just cut that tax to near zero, and a quarter century of backlog started draining. Tao being Tao, he published his edited transcripts for transparency and keeps the framing sober: agents still introduce bugs, and that risk is acceptable for supplementary visualizations, not yet for load-bearing work. Which is exactly how you would want the most careful person in mathematics to adopt this.
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/
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Then came the part that matters more than the ports. Tao built the things he never got to: a spacetime diagram tool for special relativity he had abandoned as too much work 25 years ago, and a new interactive visualization of the Gilbreath conjecture. Projects that sat dead for a quarter century because implementation cost more than a working mathematician could justify — cleared in an afternoon of conversation.
This is the cleanest 100X datapoint you will see, precisely because there is no benchmark attached. The bottleneck for the world's best mathematician was never mathematical ability; it was the implementation tax on every idea. Agents just cut that tax to near zero, and a quarter century of backlog started draining. Tao being Tao, he published his edited transcripts for transparency and keeps the framing sober: agents still introduce bugs, and that risk is acceptable for supplementary visualizations, not yet for load-bearing work. Which is exactly how you would want the most careful person in mathematics to adopt this.
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/
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