act101

Questions from the bench

Can an AI agent actually refactor my Python codebase with act?

Yes. act ships as one native binary with two interfaces — MCP and a CLI — both exposing the same 182 AST-aware refactor operations, so agents like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and OpenCode can call rename, extract function, inline, move symbol, convert-to-dataclass, add-type-hints, and 60+ Python-specific refactors directly, with cross-file import updates, automatic checkpoint, and instant undo.

Can an AI agent port a C codebase to Rust?

Yes. act provides 10 porting operations — port_contract, port_inventory, port_order, a port_manifest state machine, and cross-language adapter/shim generators — that let an agent define a source-to-target contract, inventory every symbol that must move, resolve dependency ordering, and track the migration step by step. The same workflow handles Ruby to Elixir, COBOL to Java, Python 2 to Python 3, and arbitrary source-to-target language pairs across 163 supported grammars.

How is act different from ast-grep, comby, or semgrep?

ast-grep, comby, and semgrep are pattern-matching and structural search tools designed for humans. act is one native binary that exposes typed, parameterised refactor operations (extract-function, rename, move-symbol, etc.) through MCP and a CLI, with automatic checkpointing and instant undo. It lets an agent perform end-to-end refactoring and cross-language porting without rewriting whole files.

Is cross-language porting production-ready?

Porting is a workflow, not a button. act ships 10 porting operations — contract, inventory, dependency ordering, a manifest state machine, and adapter/shim generators — plus parity verification that checks a ported function behaves like the original. Small, well-tested modules port well today; a large legacy migration is a program of work run step by step under the manifest.

Which AI coding agents work with act?

act is one native binary that is both an MCP server and a CLI. Run act mcp serve and Claude Code, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, and OpenCode connect via stdio or HTTP+SSE — or run any act subcommand directly. Marketplace install blocks are included for the agents above.