An 800,000-line codebase from a closed startup rebuilt
Claude helped reverse engineer a defunct startup's Python and C code, pull out its core ideas and rewrite it with modern frameworks, guided by the original authors.
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The full story
A Hacker News commenter got access to the code of a closed startup: 800,000 lines of Python and C written from the 1990s onwards, encoding 20 to 30 years of work on a specific chemistry problem. It was hard to understand and wouldn't run on modern hardware such as GPUs.
With Claude and Gemini, and guidance from the original authors, they reverse engineered the code, pulled out the core ideas and rewrote it with modern libraries. A working equivalent took ten days and about 10,000 lines.
How it was done
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Sources
From a passing comment or social post, so the details are thin.
- Hacker News: I had access to a repo (from a closed startup) with 800K lines of python & C code, written from the HN commenter: plumefarPosted
The Hacker News comment.