Terence Tao Migrates 30-Year-Old Website Using AI
新智元 · wechat · 2026-07-13
Terence Tao used an AI agent to rebuild his personal website of nearly 30 years, completing a massive migration in a single day: 560 papers and preprints, 374 travel logs, 68 courses, 19 books, and 29 math applets were moved to GitHub Pages.
What the Migration Entailed
- The new tao-web repository uses YAML as the single source of truth, generating web pages automatically via scripts.
- Facts scattered across the old site were consolidated into structured data.
- GitHub Actions handles automated validation, generation, and deployment.
Unexpected Discoveries
- AI found numerous contradictions, outdated info, and broken links on the old site.
- It also ported several Java 1.0 applets to JavaScript.
- Notably, AI discovered two bugs in code Tao wrote over two decades ago that he was unaware of.
His Conclusion
- While modern AI still hallucinates, an "AI + human review" workflow might yield lower error rates and correction costs than purely manual maintenance.
- For academic institutions, AI is highly effective for data migration, structuring, and automated maintenance.
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