1 Introduction

When I first started learning effect-ts, I built several projects to try to get the feel for using it. One of the places I was most excited to use it in was my frida agents that I was using to explore TinyTower.

Frida is a dynamic reverse engineering toolkit, and that work “dynamic” was what made me so excited to try to introduce effect-ts into the mix. I had already built to much retry logic and error handling for frida, I was excited to also get all the other benefits that effect brings. The path to marrying frida with effect was much more tumultuous than I expected though. That might have partially been because I had big goals lol.

2 Goals

After having spent some time in the effect ecosystem building wireguard and docker packages, I then transitioned to building my frida+effect integrations. I thought of a few packages I wanted to build:

• a frida tools wrapper for providing frida devices and sessions as effect layers

• an effect “platform-frida” package for providing frida runtime specific implementations of services

• an effect “sql-frida” package for providing a frida implementation for the effect sql interface

• an effect “rpc-frida” package for providing a frida implementation for the effect rpc interface

The last two I had no idea where to start on, nor how I would even implement them. Additionally, along the way, I built two more packages:

• a polyfills package for polyfill-ing everything needed to get effect working in frida’s GumJS environment

• a vitest pool for running test suites inside of a frida agent

Today, all of these packages have been built and are available under the @efffrida organization on npm. Now, I wanted to start migrating to effect-smol.

3 Initial Migration Attempt

I initially attempted to have AI do the migration for me. If you want to try to do the same, I will make a git tag from right before the migration. In the end, the agent consumed all of my weekly rate limit after having compacting the context a few times. I would say that it got about halfway, but there was some refactoring I needed to do on the code it migrated.

4 Pain Points

There is a list of APIs that have been pain points for others while migrating, it can be found here https://github.com/Effect-TS/effect-smol/issues/1378. In my case, I found that some of the Layer api changes and no more Effect.asyncEffect and Effect.dieMessage to be points of friction. The agent didn’t really know how to migrate these, and generated code that I was unsatisfied with.