Rars: a Rust RAR implementation, mostly written by LLMs (bitplane.net)
I spent a fortnight using Claude to create specs for every version of RAR, then another using gpt-5.5 to write compressors in Rust.
It's not fast and it's not pretty, but it works.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 56.6 ms ] threadDoes it? How are you legally intending to use copyright to license this machine output? How would you know it's not encumbered in any way?
Were you flagged for a cybersecurity violation?
As mathematicians say, optimization is left as an exercise to the reader. You did the hard part.
One thing I have been curious at is are there any ways to stop a rar compression mid way and then continue it later?
Like suppose I have a compression happening for a large file, then would there be a possibility with this project to shut down the computer mid compression and continue it after starting it again?
I would really love it if you can add this functionality!
First use some model to make a specification. Then another to implement it from the specification.
How can you shout at Claude when it’s
1) foobaring, bamblabooing and fghrtawing all the time without telling you what’s going on
2) when it finally interacts, it’s asking for a permission you told it 30 seconds ago "yes and do not ever ask me again until heat death of the Universe"
3) and after all of that, it just spits out: "you’re out of tokens, give up your liver or wait until next Trump’s war"
Re-shaping the context sometimes involves severe pressures like "wtf is this ugly crap?" or "did I just spot you laying a turd in my codebase again?" and other strong forms of disapproval, mixed with "hmm not sure I like the sound of that"s, to "yea that's much better" to pull it back in the other direction.
The trick is to shape the flow before the tide comes in and you end up like King Canute
Kudos to the author. A fun read, thank you for sharing.
Are you sure "it works?"
Second, why compress to RAR if you can compress to 7z?
He seems to like doing this kind of stuff.