Paint.NET author Rick Brewster revealed that the team used Claude to create a clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D for WINE compatibility, producing ~180,000 lines of 'vibe coded' output. Brewster had to heavily supervise Claude for resource management and architecture decisions, noting the AI's performance was inconsistent but ultimately impressive on complex reverse engineering tasks like Direct2D's built-in effects formulas.
Background
Paint.NET is a popular Windows image editor by Rick Brewster. WINE is a compatibility layer allowing Windows applications to run on Unix-like systems.
- Source
- Simon Willison
- Published
- Sep 2, 2026 at 01:50 PM
- Score
- 6.0 / 10