Porting 100k lines from TypeScript to Rust using Claude Code in a month

Summary

I read this post “Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases [from C++ to Rust]. Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.” and it got me curious, how difficult is it really? I've long wanted to build a competitive Pokemon battle AI after watching a lot of WolfeyVGC and following the PokéAgent challenge at NeurIPS. Thankfully there's an open source project called "Pokemon Showdown" that implements all the rules but it's written in JavaScript which is quite slow to run in a training loop. So my holiday project came to life: let's convert it to Rust using Claude! Escaping the sandbox Having the AI able to run arbitrary code on your machine is dangerous, so there's a lot of safeguards put in place. But... at the same time, this is what I want to do in this case. So let me walk through the ways I escaped the various sandboxes. git push Claude runs in a sandbox that limits some operations like ssh access. You need ssh access in order to publish to GitHub. This is very important as I want to be able to check how the AI is doing from my phone while I do some other activities 😉 What I realized is that I can run the code on my terminal but Claude cannot do it from its own terminal. So what I did was to ask Claude to write a nodejs script that opens an http server on a local port that executes the git commands from the url. Now I just need to keep a tab open on my terminal with this server active and ask Claude to write instructions in Claude.md for it to interact with it. rustc There's an antivirus on my computer that requires a human interaction when an unknown binary is being ran. Since every time we compile it's a new unknown binary, this wasn't going to work. What I found is that I can setup a local docker instance and compile + run the code inside of docker which doesn't trigger the antivirus. Again, I asked Claude to generate the right instructions in Claude.md and problem solved. The next hurdle was to ...