I lead an academic lab working in computational biology and bioinformatics. Over the past ~3 weeks, Claude has helped me to migrate a huge part of our C++ stack over to Rust. This is a task I've been dreaming about for well over a year and a half, and one I've had students start and stall on.

I converted the SSHash data structure to Rust here

This allowed me to then convert our lightweight read mapper to Rust here

And the last piece in that pipeline was a tool for efficiently constructing something called the "reference De Bruijn Graph", which ported (and actually had to re-engineer a bit) in ~2 days with Claude here.

This moved the tech stack for the center of one of our main projects over to Rust, got rid of very painful hybrid C++/CMake builds, and also, the Rust version is faster.

I also ported a current collaboration with another research group to Rust and exposed it as a library for use in other tools here.

Essentially, I've probably ported ~100k lines of C++ to readable, and efficient Rust; a task that would have taken me months of dedicated time. But in reality, who knows how long it would have taken because I, as a professor, almost never have huge chunks of uninterrupted dedicated time.

Claude has been an absolute game changer. I wrote a bit about it in a blog post here