Show HN: Urlx – an agent-made Rust replacement for curl/libcurl

Recently several AI labs have published experiments where they tried to get AI coding agents to complete large software projects.

- Cursor attempted to make a browser from scratch: https://crates.io/crates/urlx-cli

- Install: cargo install urlx-cli or brew install jonwiggins/tap/urlx

The same lesson from xmloxide applies here: when a project has a good test suite, an agent can use it as a specification and converge on a working implementation surprisingly fast. curl's test suite turned out to be an excellent spec, the hard part was already done by the curl contributors over 25 years.

I don't expect anyone to replace curl with this, but I think there's something worth paying attention to in the pattern: take a well-tested project, point an agent at the test suite, and get a fast reimplementation. I think this also points to a need to adopt test-driven-development when using AI coding tools, as it allows them to iterate autonomously before needing human input. I also think this changes the economics of software development, what used to be a multi-year, multi-engineer commitment is becoming a task you can meaningfully attempt in days by setting up an agent to rapidly iterate on it alone.