I have 143 stars on a repo I can't run
I run a public repo with 143 stars and 28 forks. Quran, hadith, translations, tafaseer — structured for NLP. I cannot clone it onto a clean machine and get it working without a day of archaeology, and I wrote most of it.
It isn't abandoned. I pushed to it recently. It's unmaintainable, which is a different disease with a much bigger population — and yours probably has it too.
In 75 minutes I'll revive it live with an AI coding agent, and leave in every part where the agent gets it wrong. That's the actual lesson. Agents are excellent on greenfield and dangerous on old code, where wrong output compiles, matches your style guide, and passes review at a glance.
You'll leave with: a five-stage method for pointing agents at old code without wrecking it · the failure modes that cost me the most time · a way to constrain an agent away from parts of a codebase where a plausible hallucination is unacceptable · the repo, the branch and the recording, free.
For: anyone with a repo they gave up on. No experience with agent harnesses assumed.
Free. No recording gate, no signup wall.