figwig ships formal Kaitai Struct spec, auto-generate readers/writers in any language
jmschreiber91 · x · 2026-10-28
The author of the figwig bioinformatics file format published a formal Kaitai Struct specification (PR written with Claude Code), fully defining endianness, varints, CRC-32, zlib streams, tile numbering, the 128-byte header field by field, chromosome/stats/metadata tables, and index structures.
Also included:
- A reader generated from the spec, tested against files the package writes
- Fast CLI tools: bigWig↔figwig, fragment files with cell barcodes → figwig, etc.
- An agentic skill to help AI agents work with the format efficiently
With the Kaitai spec, an exact reader/writer can be generated in any language, letting the community plug it into their own stacks. The team will keep using and improving figwig internally, with support from Anthropic's AI for Science program.
Related event: figwig file format ships formal Kaitai Struct spec(2 posts)→
More from coding & agent
- Nyxis: a Lean framework with formally proven authorization safety for AI-written backends — udmrzn · 2026-10-28
- LangChain shares how it built its design agent: taste, sandboxes and multiplayer UX — LangChain · 2026-10-28
- Judgment Labs launches publicly: monitoring and eval layer for long-horizon agents — testingcatalog · 2026-10-28
- OSU NLP Group Wins Three Paper Awards Same Day at EMNLP 2026 and NeurIPS Workshop — hhsun1 · 2026-10-28
- Replit launches Cloud Agents: non-engineers ship reviewed PRs from natural language — Jeff_Burke14 · 2026-10-28
- Sequoia and OpenAI host $100K poker bot tournament where agents build bots in 60 minutes — polynoamial · 2026-10-28