July 12, 2026
Proof by vibe coding
Old and new apps, via modern coding agents by Terry Tao
Math genius revives dead apps with AI—and the comments instantly turned into a trust battle
TLDR: Terry Tao used an AI coding helper to bring his old math teaching apps back from the dead and quickly build new visual tools he had once given up on. The community loved the nerdy comeback but instantly split into jokes, cautious optimism, and suspicion over how much trust AI deserves.
Terence Tao — yes, that Terence Tao, the superstar mathematician — casually dropped a post about using artificial intelligence helpers to resurrect his ancient 1999 teaching applets, and the community reaction was far louder than the software news itself. The basic plot is simple: old Java classroom tools had long since died with the web, Tao asked an AI coding assistant to rebuild them in modern JavaScript, and within hours he had colorful, working versions back online. He even used the same approach to finally build a long-abandoned special relativity drawing tool and a new visualization for the Gilbreath conjecture. Very wholesome, very nerdy — and then the comment section showed up.
One camp praised Tao for sounding refreshingly sane about AI: useful for side projects, risky for anything mission-critical, and definitely not magic. As one commenter put it, "It’s a tool. Good for some things but not others" — which became the thread’s unofficial slogan. Another camp immediately swerved into suspicion, with one commenter wondering if Tao’s increasingly positive AI posts hinted at undisclosed ties, even dropping a Reddit link like they were entering evidence in court.
And because the internet can never resist a joke, one of the funniest reactions imagined a future where a Fields Medal winner is begging a chatbot to explain why his container app won’t start "just like the rest of us." Another commenter declared Tao’s clunky opening sentence proof the post couldn’t have been written by AI. In other words: the apps are back, the math is pretty, and the crowd is split between "cool", "careful", and "hmm, what’s really going on here?"
Key Points
- •Terry Tao migrated legacy Java 1.0 mathematics applets to JavaScript using an AI coding agent as part of moving old web and blog material into a more maintainable repository.
- •The porting process restored about two dozen old applets, including visualizations for honeycombs and Besicovitch sets, and added some graphical improvements.
- •Tao reports finding only one minor bug in the AI-ported applets, while the agent also identified two bugs in the original code.
- •He used AI assistance to build a new special relativity visualization tool based on an idea he had started but abandoned in 1999.
- •He also created a Gilbreath conjecture visualization after writing a related blog post and says similar interactive supplements may accompany future papers.