Port of the TypeScript compiler, checker and lsp to Rust, by LLM

> Spent over $400,000 in API priced tokens with GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT 6 Astra

Tangent here, but I think this bit is super interesting!

You could viably hire someone to do this work for that kind of money - I think the interesting thing is that substantially less interested/experimenting engineers would consider paying for a human to do this work, than would happily chuck a big amount of money into an LLM.

I don't have any suggestion about why that exists, but it's a strange and interesting contract.

Paraphrasing from README.md:

>Spent over $400,000 in API priced tokens with GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT 6 Astra. They wrote over 1.3m lines of Rust over multiple months of /goal loops and never got past like 84% compat.

Then they let Claude code lose on the problem:

> I figured it'd be fun to throw Opus 5.5 at this. It had a working v0 in 10 hours. I assumed it kept using the code the Codex models wrote. I was wrong. Opus 5.5 started from scratch. It got further than Astra in 1/10th the time.

In the warnings from README.md

> Also worth mentioning: I've never read a line of this code.

TypeScript team member here - this is impressive work, and it's honestly crazy that 3 of these ports have popped up in the last week! I'm currently AFK but we're hoping to learn more and we'll have more to say on this soon.

What a waste of power... $424.000 of API priced tokens amounts to how many kWh burned? And how would you trust this to build your code? Motivations says it all:

Motivations

    Test model capabilities
    Make a fast TypeScript type checker
    Make a ts checker that can work in WASM with high performance
    Memes

Maybe there are just so many of these but at this point for vibe coded stuff like this I’m just like “who cares.” LLMs can make stuff like this now. Unless this reaches some critical mass of usage among developers why would I use it? It’s just a less maintained, less tested implementation. The more important question is “what does this teach us?” And idk the answer to that one.

In the real world project section, compile times vs tsc7 were 1-3s less. Sometimes the percentages are far more impressive than absolutes.

I wish Anthropic/OpenAI would give me free tokens so I could make random things like this

I already pay for subs on both but the tokens are already spoken for with other projects

This was a lot of tokens to spend on a port. I wonder if all of the porting activity out there would be better supported by investing in really good deterministic automatic translators that do 90% of the job cheaply and delegate any decisions that have to be made back out to the AI agent?

I have to wonder if LLM reimplementations verified against years of human tests will have holes where original authors thought that tests are not necessary and common sense is enough.

I have to wonder this to preserve my ego as a human. I wonder have to this because I sure as hell am never going to go through all that code to check.

LLMs have been trained to fix compile errors in a loop. Give them years of human labor worth of tests and they will fix compile errors until it works (as well as the tests can ensure). Now you have a codebase no one has read. Good luck adding new code to it.

Let's also not forget that Bun was claiming a rewrite in 11 days or whatever it was, but actually spent three months of human labor fixing hundreds of issues their rewrite introduced before shipping it as a release.

"In total I did over $400,000 in API priced tokens with GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT 6 Astra."

wut?

    # “The Slop Line"

      Everything below this was written by my LLMs, not me.

This post should be titled “Rust port of Go rewrite of Typescript compiler”

Wait - you spent north of $400,000?

I'm curious how much unsafe this uses? Are these ports making idiomatic code or just using unsafe all over. There doesn't seem to be anything in the readme.

Are there any specific harnesses or techniques to aid in porting stuff to Rust? Specialized in terms of token efficiency

I honestly have no idea what the future of tech will look like at this point. Too much has changed.

Is this going to be a serious project? No.

Is this going to be maintained? Nope

Nevertheless this and many others are showing what is possible. Much akin to how someone ports doom onto a microwave.

We'll look back at this time with great fondness when we collectively discovered a whole new gear.

Why does it seem like this is falling off the front page really fast? There's older posts with less points that are way higher.