Porting MiniJinja to Go With an Agent
January 16, 2026
Turns out you can just port things now. I already attempted this experiment in the summer, but it turned out to be a bit too much for what I had time for. However, things have advanced since. Yesterday I ported MiniJinja (a Rust Jinja2 template engine) to native Go, and I used an agent to do pretty much all of the work. In fact, I barely did anything beyond giving some high-level guidance on how I thought it could be accomplished.
I’ve been posting a few pieces like this from really experienced and knowledgeable software developers, sharing how they have been working with code generation and the lessons they’ve learned.
I think there is a couple of values in paying attention to things like this:
1. These are not randos on LinkedIn pontificating about the future of coding. These are seasoned software engineers who often have expressed, like Armin has in the past, scepticism.
2. About the value of these tools and it’s also about real-world work they are doing and at least some lessons they’ve learned along the way of doing it.
So you may need proof points or convincing about the capability of these technologies. Or you may already be using them and could learn valuable lessons from people on a similar journey.
