The core of the story centers on DHH overseeing a rapid AI-assisted rewrite: the Python library TerminalTextEffects was transformed into Rust in just over three hours, yielding 21,000 lines of Rust and a 3MB executable, at a token cost of about 11 million.

Eight agents worked in parallel on multiple branches with iterative merging, testing, and failure handling, delivering the result in what was described as a near one-shot process.

Looking ahead, experts say the marginal cost of code generation is shrinking toward zero, shifting programmer focus from writing code to defining requirements, enforcing constraints, testing, and validating AI-generated outputs.

The same AI-assisted refactoring approach scaled to Bun’s codebase, migrating about a million lines from Zig to Rust in under two weeks, underscoring scalable AI-driven program evolution.

As with tech coverage, the piece includes standard financial disclosures about potential third-party sourcing and investment risk from KuCoin.

Different AI models yielded results: Claude Code delivered faster results with no manual intervention, while Codex also showed strong output but was slower and costlier.

TerminalTextEffects, or TTE, is a terminal visual effects engine that can run as a CLI or be used as a Python library to control text movement, colors, gradients, and animations.

Historically, DHH argued coding should remain human-driven, even flirting with retirement if AI fully took over, but by 2024–25 he pivoted to AI-assisted coding as a primary workflow.

His stance evolved from advocating human-written code to an agent-first approach, suggesting that within about five years many people may not be hand-writing or reading code.

The Rust rewrite dramatically improved performance: startup time dropped from 87 ms to 2 ms, and rendering speed increased roughly tenfold, delivering substantially faster results.

The new ttfx repository lives under DHH’s Omarchy organization, preserving all commits and illustrating how a Python tool can be effectively converted to Rust with nearly identical size and functionality.