One prompt, a hike later: Rust PDF compressor matches ILovePDF, built autonomously by Claude
avt_im · x · 2026-09-27
Researcher Alexander Terenin let Claude build a Rust PDF compression tool from scratch: given a few sample PDFs and asked to reverse-engineer why ILovePDF performs so well, the agent produced 15 techniques (image resizing, font merging, metadata removal). He fired off the prompt, went hiking, and returned to a working codebase competitive with ILovePDF on his thousand-paper test set — work that pre-AI would have needed a dev team. Open-sourced as compress-pdf, installable via cargo.
Related event: Researcher Rebuilds iLovePDF Compression Tool with Claude(2 posts)→
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