Story · Simon Willison
Rick Brewster: Claude wrote most of Paint.NET's clean-room Direct2D rewrite for WINE (Simon Willison)
blog post · Story page
Rick Brewster says Paint.NET runs on WINE because of a clean-room Direct2D rewrite Claude wrote, about 180,000 lines he says he can't possibly review next to the 700,000 in the rest of Paint.NET, which he's worked on for over 20 years. Most of it is vibe coded, he says, and he had to babysit resource management.
In plain words
- Rick Brewster says Claude wrote most of a replacement for graphics software that Paint.NET depends on.
- The replacement copied the needed behavior from scratch instead of relying on the original graphics software.
- Brewster says he could not thoroughly review the 180,000 lines Claude produced.
- He says Claude needed close supervision to track when parts of the program were still in use.
- This gives Paint.NET a needed workaround, while leaving its maintainers responsible for a large body of lightly reviewed code.
Appeared in
- Google's Mantis bug-fixing harness, and privilege escalation in 12 agent harnesses
Sep 03, 2026 · in the sections
Subscribe
Get the brief in your inbox
Pick daily, weekly, or both. Nothing is gated either way: every issue is on the site and in the feeds.
- Weekdays at 8:45am IST, one lead story and 6 to 9 items.
- Sundays, an argued synthesis rather than a recap.
- One click to leave, and quiet days say so in the subject line.