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Published June 26, 2025 in Industry
How we internationalized our React codebase in under an hour with Kilo Code. AI agents like Kilo Code automate i18n extraction, turning a tedious process into a fast, reliable workflow.
At Prismy, we used to see internationalization as a massive headache: tedious, time-consuming, and with little immediate business value. But that was before the rise of AI agents like Kilo Code.
Early-stage teams move fast. User-facing texts are hardcoded everywhere. But the day inevitably comes when you need to support a second language. And that's when the fear kicks in:
Some teams keep postponing. Others hire freelancers. But today, there's a much faster, scalable option.
Where a human developer would painfully hunt for hardcoded strings, an AI agent like Kilo Code excels:
We tested Kilo Code on a reasonably large React project: 286 files, including 121 with hardcoded text. The result? Complete internationalization in under one hour.
orchestrator
agent (which coordinates the code
, debug
, and architect
sub-agents)Here is the prompt we provided to Kilo Code to launch the mission:
We need to internationalise our codebase, currently hardcoded in English.
What you need to do:
- knowing that our stack is JS/TS ; react on the front and node in the backend, choose i18n libraries compatible with both front & back, at least with the same syntax
- setup the lib and put a language selector in the user setting (do not need to be persisted in the backend for now)
- browse all the files of our codebase, and identify user-facing hardcoded texts, use the i18n library
- make sure to smartly use the i18n namespace features, so the keys are well sorted in the file
- for now, only create the key/values for the english file, we will later fill the french, do not translate anything for now
- make sure the project builds and run
Within minutes:
i18next
(smart choice, even though we hadn't specified any library),Watching files edit themselves live was truly impressive. After about 5 minutes, the project was partially internationalized and still fully functional.
During the first pass, a namespace config issue caused keys to appear in the UI instead of translated texts. I simply sent a screenshot via Kilo Code's built-in chat. Within seconds, the agent identified and fixed the problem without me writing any code.
Instead of running a full extraction at once, I proceeded feature by feature (about 20 files per batch). After roughly ten iterations and less than an hour of actual work, the entire codebase was internationalized.
One PR later: done.
With the i18n foundation laid by Kilo Code, we plugged in Prismy to industrialize translation management:
👉 Huge kudos to the Kilo Code team for this flawless execution.
If you're still hesitant about tackling internationalization: now is the time. AI agents are ready.