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Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process
josvdwest wrote 4 hours 38 min ago:
Such a cool game! Exactly the simple TD game I've been craving for a
while.
If you ever want to build this out in Unity, you should try [1] for the
AI copilot
Thanks for the game!
[1]: https://www.coplay.dev/
Waterluvian wrote 8 hours 22 min ago:
I’m finding incredible amusement in the idea of there being people
who check-in prompts as the source code, and the “reproducible
builds” people, and sitting them next to each other at a convention.
Lerc wrote 12 hours 19 min ago:
Thanks for this, I made a tower defence a while ago and I had been
considering applying an AI to the task of designing new waves and
tuning hitpoints/speed/armour
It made me think that one of the things that it probably needs is a way
to get a 'feel' for the game in motion. Perhaps a protocol for
encoding visible game state into tokens is needed. With terrain, game
entity positions, and any other properties visible to the player. I
don't think a straight autoencoder over the whole thing would work but
a game element autoencoder might as a list of tokens.
Then the game could provide an image for what the screen looks like
plus tokens fed directly out of the engine to give the AI a notion of
what is actually occurring. I'm not sure how much training a model
would need to be able to use the tokens effectively. It's possible
that the current embedding space can hold a representation of game
state in a few tokens, then maybe only finetuning would be needed.
You'd 'just' need a training set of game logs with measurements of how
much fun people found them. There's probably some intriguing
information there for whoever makes such a dataset. Identifying
player preference clusters would open doors to making variants of
existing games for different player types.
davidmurdoch wrote 13 hours 23 min ago:
> AIs like to write a lot of code
I vibe coded a greenfield side project last weekend for the first time
and I was not prepared for this. It wrote probably 5x more functions
than it needed or used, and it absolutely did not trust the type
definitions. It added runtime guards for so many random property
accesses.
I enjoyed watching it go from taking credit for writing new files and
changes, and then slowly forgetting after a few hours that it was the
one that wrote it ... repeatedly calling calling it "legacy" code and
assuming the intents of the original author.
But yeah, it, Claude (no idea which one), likes to be verbose!
I especially find it funny when it would load the web app in the
built-in browser to check its work, and then claiming it found the
problem before the page even finishes opening.
I noticed it's really obsessed with using Python tooling... in a
typescript/node/npm project.
Overall it was fun and useful, but we've got a long way to go before
PMs and non-engineers can write production-quality software from
scratch via prompts.
MattRix wrote 12 hours 33 min ago:
In my experience Claude Sonnet is much more verbose than Claude Opus,
and writes worse code as a result. The difference is pretty striking
once you try using them both for the same task.
ukuina wrote 5 hours 46 min ago:
It generally feels like Opus gives you the 5th or 10th iteration,
but Sonnet gives you the first possible solution.
iaw wrote 13 hours 54 min ago:
I've been using Claude to do the things that are straightforward that I
don't want to for about a month now. The power of these development
techniques is no where near fully tapped yet from what I can see.
M4v3R wrote 13 hours 46 min ago:
Oh definitely. Just wait one year. Or five. Or ten. We’re in it for
a wild, wild ride.
zahirbmirza wrote 13 hours 56 min ago:
so cool
jedberg wrote 15 hours 1 min ago:
Ok folks, I need a hint. I can't ever build up enough energy to afford
a second turret. What's the secret?
ethan_smith wrote 12 hours 41 min ago:
Focus on upgrading your first turret to level 2 before building a
second one - this increases energy generation significantly and makes
additional turrets affordable.
jedberg wrote 12 hours 29 min ago:
Ah!! I didn’t even realize I could upgrade. Thanks!
M4v3R wrote 12 hours 25 min ago:
Um, you can’t ^^’. The key is to use the rewind power very
sparingly, only as long as it’s required to destroy the enemy.
This way you’ll guarantee you will be in the net positive
energy generation for the first 2-3 waves. You should be able to
afford the 2nd tower by the end of Wave 2.
jedberg wrote 12 hours 19 min ago:
I was barely using the backspace, I even tried letting most of
the enemies through, but I never built up enough energy for a
second tower.
shironandonon_ wrote 15 hours 3 min ago:
Thanks for the read! I too have over 20 years in tech and have been
going back and forth with Gemini-cli to gamify some tools for
integration testing some Enterprise applications and it’s amazing
what can be done with Gemini alongside usage of MCP servers. I am
finding positive results if I approach problems in chunks and provide
clarity in prompt instructions. The AI will make mistakes and
sometimes get caught up in loops for some problems (like application
routing.. lol) but I am happy to step in and effectively pair program
with the AI when issues are present. I notice too that it has never
been a better time to enforce things like how Duplication Is Evil
because otherwise the AI may make a change in one area and forget that
it has similar changes to make in another file. This applies both to
programming logic as well as User eXperience and application behaviour.
Anyway what a world. It would have taken me weeks to create what an AI
and myself are able to whip up in a few short, and fun, hours.
Giving a personality to Gemini is also a vital feature to me. I love
the portability of the GEMINI.md file so I can bring that personality
onto other devices and hand-tailor it to custom specifications.
EwanG wrote 15 hours 12 min ago:
Curious if anyone here has tried rosebud.ai for something similar. I
looked into it, and it did appear to break it down into steps, but
can't really produce anything that runs without upgrading to a paid
tier.
alganet wrote 16 hours 45 min ago:
I think indie games could be a really good use case for coding AIs. Low
stakes, fun-oriented, sounds like a match.
The first commit[0] seems to have a lot of code, but no `PROMPTS.md`
yet.
For example, `EnergySystem.ts` is already present on this first commit,
but later appears in the `PROMPTS.md` in a way that suggests it was
made from scratch by the AI.
Can you elaborate a bit more on this part of the repository history?
[0]:
[1]: https://github.com/maciej-trebacz/tower-of-time-game/commit/81...
M4v3R wrote 16 hours 16 min ago:
Because this was a game jam entry with one week deadline I was going
pretty fast and didn't bother to use source control for the first 2-3
days of work, hence the huge initial commit. I also weren't writing
down prompts as I went, only after the game was finished I went back
in my chat history in the tools I used and copied all the prompts to
the `PROMPTS.md` file.
If you want to follow the history of this project as it was created
the best way would be to read the prompts file from top to bottom.
For example the EnergySystem.ts file was created right after I was
done with enemy pathfinding, spawing and tower shooting and it was
created from scratch by the AI using the prompt "I want to implement
an Energy subsystem where..."
alganet wrote 16 hours 3 min ago:
Thanks for clarifying!
Also, good catch in using the chat history to reconstruct the first
phases of work.
I believe it can be a fun experiment for others to try to reproduce
it from scratch using the prompts and image assets only.
smusamashah wrote 16 hours 47 min ago:
How much time did it take start to finish?
M4v3R wrote 16 hours 8 min ago:
It took about a week working on it on and off in my spare time. I'd
say probably 25-30 hours total.
colinmilhaupt wrote 16 hours 49 min ago:
Thanks for sharing! This aligns with a workflow I've been converging on
incorporating traceability and transparency into LLM-augmented
workflows[1]. One of the big benefits I've realized is sharing and
committing prompts gives significantly more insight into the original
problem set out to be solved by the developer, and then it additionally
shows how it morphed over time or what new challenges arose. Cool
project!
[1]: https://colinmilhaupt.com/posts/responsible-llm-use/
jslakro wrote 17 hours 27 min ago:
I didn't find any mention to the costs spent on Claude
iaw wrote 13 hours 58 min ago:
I'm using Claude for my side projects. The pricing tiers are Free
(for Sonnet 3.5), $20/m for Opus 4, $100/m for max (5x usage limit as
$20) and then a $200 tier above that at another 5x I believe.
The usage limits reset every 6 hours.
M4v3R wrote 17 hours 25 min ago:
I've mentioned this in other replies, but I actually didn't pay for
Claude directly, only via Cursor with their $20/mo subscription.
doddpronter wrote 17 hours 42 min ago:
That's pretty impressive and super motivating. Love that you documented
the prompts. From my experience "vibe coding" can either speed you up
or slow you down. As long as you are using succinct and clear
instructions and know how to review code quickly, as well as understand
the architecture you can really speed up the process
malochak wrote 18 hours 22 min ago:
I couldn't stop playing this game, very engaging :)
Thanks!
thegrim33 wrote 18 hours 34 min ago:
After scanning through the video, the first 20 minutes is a guy doing
coding with no AI involved. He's manually designing a level in a
pre-made level editor. He's manually writing code in a pre-made IDE.
He's not having AI code.
At the 20 minute mark, he decides to ask the AI a question. He wants it
to figure out how to prevent a menu from showing when it shouldn't. It
takes him 57 seconds to type/communicate this to the AI.
He then basically just sits there for over 60 seconds while the AI
analyzes the relevant code and figures it out, slowly outputting
progress along the way.
After a full two minutes into this "AI assistance" process, the AI
finally tells him to just call a "canBuildAtCurrentPosition" method
when a button is pressed, which is a method that already exists, to
switch on whether the menu should be shown or not.
The AI also then tries to do something with running the game to test if
that change works, even though in the context he provided he told it to
never try to run it, so he has to forcefully stop the AI from
continuing to spend more time running, and he has to edit a context
file to be even more explicit about how the AI should not do that. He's
frustrated, saying "how many times do I have to tell it to not do
that".
So, his first use of AI in 20 minutes of coding, is an over two minute
long process, for the AI to tell him to just call a method that already
existed when a button is pressed. A single line change. A change which
you could trivially do in < 5 seconds if you were just aware of what
code existed in your project.
About what I expected.
rybosome wrote 16 hours 51 min ago:
One could find a 5-minute slice of any highly successful project
I’ve worked on where my actions look foolish and my tools look
broken.
Isolating your analysis of this to a single unflattering interaction
is intellectually dishonest; you have a bone to pick.
M4v3R wrote 18 hours 21 min ago:
Congratulations, you've managed to spot all the pain/weak points of
the whole ~30 hour process without ever noticing all the good points.
It takes a special type of skill to do so :).
> About what I expected.
But then again, you opened the video already with an expectation to
see failure, so of course you found it.
ofjcihen wrote 18 hours 36 min ago:
Why does this and the follow up comments feel like a sneaky ad for this
“Augment Code” tool?
nico wrote 18 hours 25 min ago:
Maybe because it stands out against the other (very well known) tools
mentioned in the readme
I came back here specifically to ask about Augment Code, after going
to their website and not really understanding what it is
M4v3R wrote 18 hours 25 min ago:
You might want to read a reply I just posted to another commenter
about what I dislike about this tool and how I'll probably switch to
a different one [0]
[0]
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44463967#44465304
twalkz wrote 18 hours 38 min ago:
I'm really enjoying reading over the prompts used for development: (
[1] )
A lot of posts about "vibe coding success stories" would have you
believe that with the right mix of MCPs, some complex claude code
orchestration flow that uses 20 agents in parallel, and a bunch of
LLM-generated rules files you can one-shot a game like this with the
prompt "create a tower defense game where you rewind time. No security
holes. No bugs."
But the prompts used for this project match my experience of what works
best with AI-coding: a strong and thorough idea of what you want,
broken up into hundreds of smaller problems, with specific
architectural steers on the really critical pieces.
[1]: https://github.com/maciej-trebacz/tower-of-time-game/blob/main...
unclebucknasty wrote 7 hours 5 min ago:
>a strong and thorough idea of what you want, broken up into hundreds
of smaller problems, with specific architectural steers on the really
critical pieces.
Serious question: at what point is it easier to just write the code?
kenjackson wrote 3 hours 35 min ago:
Depends. If you have written other Tower Defense games then it’s
probably really close to that line. If you just took a CS class in
high school then this vibe approach is probably 20x faster.
My aunt would always tell me that making fresh pasta or grounding
your own meat was basically just as fast as buying it. And while it
may have have been true for her it definitely wasn’t for me.
skydhash wrote 6 hours 40 min ago:
And if it's a work project, you're going to spend a few years
working on the same tech. So by the time you're done, there's going
to be templates, snippets,... that you can quickly reuse for any
prototyping with the tech. You would be faster by the fact that you
know that it's correct and you don't have to review it. Helps
greatly with mental load. I remember initializing a project in
React by lifting whole modules out of an old one. Those modules
could have been libraries the way they were coded.
unclebucknasty wrote 3 hours 23 min ago:
All of this, and highlighting this part:
>You would be faster by the fact that you know that it's correct
and you don't have to review it. Helps greatly with mental load.
I keep thinking maybe it's me who's just not getting the vibe
coding hype. Or maybe my writing vs reading code efficiency is
skewed towards writing more than most people's. Because the idea
of validating and fixing code vs just writing it doesn't feel
efficient or quality-oriented.
Then, there's the idea that it will suddenly break code that
previously worked.
Overall, I keep hearing people advocating for providing the AI
more details, new approaches/processes/etc. to try to get the
right output. It makes me wonder if things might be coming full
circle. I mean, there has to be some point where it's better to
just write the code and be done with it.
mvkel wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
What I've found works best is to hand-code the first feature,
rendering the codebase itself effectively a self-documenting entity.
Then you can vibe code the rest.
All future features will have enough patterns defined from the first
one (schema, folder structure, modules, views, components, etc), that
very few explicit vibe coding rules need to be defined.
Swizec wrote 16 hours 1 min ago:
> what works best with AI-coding: a strong and thorough idea of what
you want, broken up into hundreds of smaller problems, with specific
architectural steers on the really critical pieces
As a tech lead who also wears product owner hats sometimes: This is
how you should do it with humans also. At least 70% of my job is
translating an executive’s “Time travel tower game. No bugs”
into that long series of prompts with a strong architectural vision
that people can work on as a team with the right levels of
abstraction to avoid stepping on each other’s toes.
AndrewKemendo wrote 16 hours 13 min ago:
> A lot of posts about "vibe coding success stories"
Where are you reading “a lot of posts” making this specific
claim? I’ve never seen any serious person make such a claim
> a strong and thorough idea of what you want, broken up into
hundreds of smaller problems, with specific architectural steers on
the really critical pieces.
This is how I’ve been using LLM bots since CGPT preview and it’s
been phenomenally useful and 100x my productivity
The gap seems to be between people who never knew how to build,
looking for a perfect Oracle that would be like a genie in a lamp,
then mad when its actual work
The thing the last few years have beat into me is that most engineers
are actually functionally bad engineers who only know 1:1000th of
what they should know in order to know how to build a successful
project end to end
My assumption was that all of the bad engineers I worked with in
person were a accidental sample of some larger group of really good
ones (who I’ve also been able to work with over the years) and that
it’s just rare to find an actual capable engineer who understands
the whole process
Turns out that’s a trivial minority (like every other field) and
most people are pretty bad at what they do
johnrob wrote 15 hours 55 min ago:
I see 100x used quite a bit related to LLM productivity. It seems
extreme because it implies one could generate a year’s worth of
value in a few days. I would think delivering features involves
too much non coding work for this to be possible.
AndrewKemendo wrote 14 hours 19 min ago:
But that’s precisely what I’m saying is that what I can do
today by myself in a couple of days would have taken me a year
with a team of three people
The key limiting factor to any project as somebody else in this
thread said was “people alignment are the number one hindrance
in project speed”
So 10 years ago if I wanted to make a web application that does
complex shit I’d have to go and hire a handful of experts have
them coordinate, manage the coordination of it, deliver it,
monitor it everything else all the way through ideation
storyboarding and everything else
I can do 100% of that myself now, now it’s true I could’ve
done 100% of myself previously, but again it took a year of side
effort to do it
sarchertech wrote 13 hours 55 min ago:
If 100x was really possible, it would be instantly, undeniably
obvious to everyone. There would be no need for people
alignment because one lone developer could crank out basically
anything less complicated than an OS in a month.
M4v3R wrote 13 hours 48 min ago:
It is starting to become obvious to more and more people. And
is it really that hard to believe that a tool can extend your
natural abilities by 2 orders of magnitude but not everyone
can instantly use it? If fact you’re using one right now.
Your computer or phone can do many things orders of magnitude
faster than you can do alone, but only until recently most
people had no idea how to use computers and could not benefit
from this power.
I believe with LLM’s were set to relive the same phenomenon
again.
sarchertech wrote 13 hours 29 min ago:
I use it at work everyday. I work with people who use it
everyday. 100x is complete and utter nonsense.
100x means that I can finish something that would have
taken me 10 years in a little over a month.
It would be obvious not because people are posting “I get
a 100x productivity boost”, but because show HN would be
filled with “look at this database engine I wrote in a
month”, and “check out this OS that took me 2
months”.
And people at work would be posting new repos where they
completely rewrote entire apps from the ground up to solve
annoying tech debt issues.
AndrewKemendo wrote 12 hours 33 min ago:
You’re missing the point by bike shedding on “100x 
It’s probably higher tbh because there’s things I
prototyped to test an assumption on, realized it was
O(N^2) then dumped it and tried 4 more architecture
simulations to get to one that was implementable with
existing tool chains I know
So you’re doing exactly what i called out which is
evaluating it as a magic oracle instead of what I said
which is that it makes me personally something like 100x
more productive as a support tool, which often means
quickly ruling out bad ideas
Preventing a problem in architecture is worth way more
than 100x
sarchertech wrote 10 hours 2 min ago:
If what you meant by 100x more productive is that
sometimes for very some specific things it made you
100x more productive, and that isn’t applicable to
software development in general, I can see that.
I have many times delivered a year of value in a few
days by figuring out that we didn’t actually need to
build something instead of just building exactly what
someone asked for.
AndrewKemendo wrote 6 hours 8 min ago:
>I have many times delivered a year of value in a few
days by figuring out that we didn’t actually need
to build something instead of just building exactly
what someone asked for.
Knowing what not to do more of a superpower than
knowing what to do - cause it’s possible to know
ramchip wrote 10 hours 39 min ago:
You can prototype by hand too. Personally I find it
might take me 10 min to try a change with an LLM that
would have taken me 30 min to 1hr by hand. It's a very
nice gain but given the other things to do that aren't
sped up by LLM all that much (thinking about the
options, communicating with the team), it's not _that_
crazy.
barrkel wrote 15 hours 58 min ago:
The bottleneck IME is people. It's almost never code. It's getting
alignment, buy-in, everyone rowing in the same direction.
Tech that powers up an individual so they can go faster can be a
bit of a liability for a company, bus factor 1 and all that.
mberning wrote 16 hours 1 min ago:
100x is a bold statement.
Kiro wrote 15 hours 51 min ago:
You can easily get to 100x in a greenfield project but you will
never get to 100x in a legacy codebase.
all2 wrote 12 hours 23 min ago:
That depends on the code-base. I've found that hand-writing the
first 50% of the code base actually makes adding new features
somewhat easier because the context/shape of the idea is
starting to come into focus. The LLM can take what exists and
extrapolate on it.
jaggs wrote 16 hours 6 min ago:
> Where are you reading “a lot of posts” making this specific
claim?
Reddit.
recursive wrote 16 hours 14 min ago:
Coincidentally those seem to be strongly correlated with success in
old fashioned application development as well.
fallinditch wrote 17 hours 14 min ago:
> what works best with AI-coding: a strong and thorough idea of what
you want, broken up into hundreds of smaller problems
A technique that works well for me is to get the AI to one-shot the
basic functionality or gameplay, and then build on top of that with
many iterations.
The one-shot should be immediately impressive, if not then ditch it
and try again with an amended prompt until you get something good to
build on.
stavros wrote 18 hours 35 min ago:
I tried to build a simple static HTML game for the board game Just
One, where you get a text box, type a word in, and it's shown full
screen on the phone. There's a bug where, when you type, the text box
jumps around, and none of the four LLMs I tried managed to fix it, no
matter how much I prompted them. I don't know how you guys manage to
one-shot entire games when I can't even stop a text box from jumping
around the screen :(
mberning wrote 15 hours 56 min ago:
Same. I had some idea that I wanted to build a basic sinatra webapp
with a couple features. First version was pretty good. Then I asked
it to use tailwind for the css. Again pretty good. Then I said I
wanted to use htmx to load content dynamically. Suddenly it decides
every backend method needs to check if the call is from htmx and
alter what it does based on that. No amount of prompting could get
it to fix it.
M4v3R wrote 15 hours 17 min ago:
Hard to tell what exactly went wrong in your case, but if I were
to guess - were you trying to do all of this in a single
LLM/agent conversation? If you'll look at my prompt history for
the game from OP you'll see it was created with a dozens of
separate conversations. This is crucial for non-trivial projects,
otherwise the agent will run out of context and start to
hallucinate.
mberning wrote 15 hours 8 min ago:
Agent mode in RubyMine which I think is using a recent version
of sonnet. I tried starting a new agent conversation but it was
still off quite a bit. For me my interest in finessing the LLM
runs out pretty quickly, especially if I see it moving further
and further from the mark. I guess I can see why some people
prefer to interact with the LLM more than the code, but I’m
the opposite. My goal is to build something. If I can do in 2
hours of prompting or 2 hours of doing it manually I’d rather
just do it manually. It’s a bit like using a mirror to button
your shirt. I’d prefer to just look down.
M4v3R wrote 14 hours 53 min ago:
> If I can do in 2 hours of prompting or 2 hours of doing it
manually I’d rather just do it manually.
100% agree, if that was the case I would not use LLMs either.
Point is, at least for my use case and using my workflow it's
more like 2 hours vs 10 minutes which suddenly changes the
whole equation for me.
fragmede wrote 18 hours 1 min ago:
CSS is the devil and I fully admit to burning many hours of dev
time, mine without an LLM, an LLM by itself, and a combination of
the two together to iron out similar layout nonsense for a game I
was helping a friend with. In the end, what solved it was breaking
things into hierarchical react components and adding divs by hand
and using the chrome dev tools inspector, and good old fashioned
human brain power to solve it. The other one was translating a
python script to rust. I let the LLM run me around in circles, but
what finally did it was using Google to find a different library to
use, and then to tell the LLM to use that library instead.
stavros wrote 17 hours 56 min ago:
I didn't realize this was so hard, thanks. I expected to be
simple positioning issues, but the LLMs all found it impossible.
Here's the game, BTW (requires multiple people in the same
location):
[1]: https://home.stavros.io/justone/
M4v3R wrote 18 hours 15 min ago:
Browser text entry on mobile phones is notoriously hard to get
right and some bugs are literally unfixable [1]. I'm a frontend
developer in my day job and I struggled with this even before AI
was a thing. I think you just accidentally picked one of the
hardest tasks for the AI to do for you. [1] Example:
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/xaksu6/on_ios_saf...
stavros wrote 18 hours 10 min ago:
Huh, that's actually my exact bug. I didn't realize this was so
hard, thank you.
mmastrac wrote 17 hours 52 min ago:
I have a reasonably good solution for this project of mine you
might find useful: [1] The trick for me was just using a hidden
input and updating the state of an in game input box. The code
is ancient by today's standards but uses a reasonably simple
technique to get the selection bounds of the text.
It works with auto complete on phones and has been stable for a
decade.
[1]: https://grack.com/demos/adventure/
stavros wrote 17 hours 37 min ago:
That's promising, thank you! I'll ask the LLM to implement
it.
gametorch wrote 18 hours 26 min ago:
> what works best with AI-coding: a strong and thorough idea of
what you want, broken up into hundreds of smaller problems, with
specific architectural steers on the really critical pieces
This has worked extremely well for me.
garciasn wrote 16 hours 35 min ago:
I have been working on an end-to-end modeling solution for my day
job and I'm doing it entirely w/Claude.
I am on full-rework iteration three, learning as I go on what
works best, and this is definitely the way. I'm going to be
making a presentation to my team about how to use AI to
accelerate and extend their day-to-day for things like this and
here's my general outline:
1. Tell the LLM your overall goal and have it craft a thoughtful
product plan from start to finish.
2. Take that plan and tell it to break each of the parts into
many different parts that are well-planned and thoroughly
documented, and then tell it to give you a plan on how to best
execute it with LLMs.
3. Then go piece by piece, refining as you go.
The tool sets up an environment, gets the data from the
warehouse, models it, and visualizes it in great detail. It took
me about 22 hours of total time and roughly 2 hours of active
time.
It's beautiful, fast, and fully featured. I am honestly BLOWN
AWAY by what it did and I can't wait to see what others on my
team do w/this. We could have all done the setup, data ingestion,
and modeling, no question; the visualization platform it built
for me we absolutely could NOT have done w/the expertise we have
on staff--but the time it took? The first three pieces probably
were a few days of time, but the last part, I have no idea.
Weeks? Months?
Amazing.
stavros wrote 18 hours 22 min ago:
I wrote a whole PRD for this very simple idea, but still the bug
persisted, even though I started from scratch four times.
Granted, some had different bugs.
cootsnuck wrote 16 hours 23 min ago:
Have you tried with both Claude opus 4 and Gemini 2.5 pro?
stavros wrote 16 hours 20 min ago:
Opus 4, Sonnet 4, o3, o4-mini-high.
gametorch wrote 18 hours 4 min ago:
I guess sometimes I have to do some minor debugging myself. But
I really haven't encountered what you're experiencing.
Early on, I realized that you have to start a new "chat" after
so many messages or the LLM will become incoherent. I've found
that gpt-4.1 has a much lower threshold for this than o3. Maybe
that's affecting your workflow and you're not realizing it?
stavros wrote 18 hours 2 min ago:
No, that's why I started again, because it's a fairly simple
problem and I was worried that the context would get
saturated. A sibling commenter said that browser rendering
bugs on mobile are just too hard, which seems to be the case
here.
skybrian wrote 18 hours 47 min ago:
This is the first I've heard of Augment Code. What does it do? Why did
you pick that tool, versus alternatives? How well did it work for you?
Do you recommend it?
virgil_disgr4ce wrote 18 hours 39 min ago:
I'd also like to hear about this—did OP use Augment Code in Cursor?
How does that work/what exactly does that get you? Do you pay for
both?
M4v3R wrote 18 hours 31 min ago:
I've heard about Augment Code on X and what piqued my interest was
their "context engine" which is a fancy way of saying they have a
way of navigating big codebases and providing enough context for
their LLM to execute your query. It worked really well on a
medium-sized codebase in my day job where other agents would fail.
It's a VS Code extension so I'm using it inside Cursor and
depending on a task I would either use Cursor's Agent mode (for
simpler, more constrained tasks) or Augment Code's (for tasks that
span multiple files and are more vague and/or require more steps to
finish).
There are downsides though - it's more expensive than Cursor ($50
vs $20 per month) and it can be unreliable - I'm frequently getting
errors/timeouts that require hitting "Try again" manually, which is
frustrating. I might switch to Claude Code after my plan runs out
because I've heard many good things about it recently.
lvl155 wrote 18 hours 48 min ago:
Part of me thinks Rockstar delayed the release of GTA 6 because they
realized they can polish the game by a significant margin using the
latest AI tools.
Brajeshwar wrote 18 hours 51 min ago:
Yours is beautiful; the code is too. I'm sure you had a lot more hand
than just using AI.
I stopped coding a long time ago. Recently, after a few friends
insisted on trying out AI-Assistance codes and I tinkered. And all I
came up was a Bubble Wrap popper, and a silencer. :-) [1]
[1]: https://bubble-pop.oinam.com
[2]: https://void.oinam.com
mordechai9000 wrote 14 hours 35 min ago:
Running chrome on android and the bubbles aren't popping for me.
Count is staying at zero. Are you open to PRs? :-)
Brajeshwar wrote 23 min ago:
Yes Please. Absolutely. Feel free to send in any edits.
[1]: https://github.com/oinam/bubble-pop
freehorse wrote 18 hours 56 min ago:
A bug in the intro: in the first round in the first playthrough my
turret destroyed one of the critter and the other reached the tower.
There was no other prompt or anything happening in the game after that
and had to restart. The next time, the turret did not destroy any
critter, the prompt to use backspace appeared and the game progressed
normally.
M4v3R wrote 18 hours 50 min ago:
Interesting, I actually had the turret destroy one of the enemies
several time but it didn't prevent the tutorial message from showing
up. I'll look into it though, thanks for the report!
laurent_du wrote 20 hours 6 min ago:
Very cool and I wish it lasted longer.
HNArg024 wrote 20 hours 9 min ago:
Great game! The rewind time "skill" it's like playing an Edge of
Tomorrow game
mgdev wrote 20 hours 14 min ago:
This is awesome. I've been in software for 20+ years now as well.
One thing I've noticed is many (most?) people in our cohort are very
skeptical of AI coding (or simply aren't paying attention).
I recently developed a large-ish app (~34k SLOC) primarily using AI. My
impression is the leverage you get out of it is exponentially
proportional to the quality of your instructions, the structure of your
interactions, and the amount of attention you pay to the outputs (e.g.
for course-correction).
"Just like every other tool!"
The difference is the specific leverage is 10x any other "10x" tool
I've encountered so far. So, just like every tool, only more so.
I think what most skeptics miss is that we shouldn't treat these as
external things. If you attempt to wholly delegate some task with a
poorly-specified description of the intended outcome, you're gonna have
a bad time. There may be a day when these things can read our minds,
but it's not today. What it CAN do is help you clarify your thinking,
teach you new things, and blast through some of the drudgery. To get
max leverage, we need to integrate them into our own cognitive loops.
majormajor wrote 17 hours 5 min ago:
> The difference is the specific leverage is 10x any other "10x" tool
I've encountered so far. So, just like every tool, only more so.
One of the best comparisons to me is languages.
The old "lisp [or whatever] lets us do more, faster" idea, but with a
fun twist where if you can reduce the code you write but still end up
with generated code in a fast, high-performance language, without the
extra work you would have to do to go add type annotations or whatnot
everywhere for SBCL.
But with a gotcha that you are gonna have to do a lot of
double-checking on some of the less-easily/obviously-verified parts
of the generated code for certain type of work.
And of course highly-expressive languages have resulted in no small
number of messy, unmaintainable codebases being built by people
without well-specified advance plans. So we're gonna see a lot of
those, still.
BUT to me the real, even bigger win - because I spend less time
writing 100% new code than integrating old and new, or trying to
improve old code/make it suit new purposes, is supercharged
debugging. A debugger is a huge improvement over print statements
everywhere for many types of things. A machine that you can
copy-paste a block of code into, and say "the output looks like
[this] instead of like [that], what's going on" and get a fresh set
of eyes to quickly give you some generally-good suggestions is a huge
improvement over the status quo for a lot of other things as well.
Especially the type of things that are hard to attach a debugger to
(sql, "infrastructure as code", build scripts, etc, just to start).
cgriswald wrote 19 hours 4 min ago:
This post was interesting to me because I also have a lot of
programming experience but other than hunt the wumpus high school I
haven’t programmed a game and recently started using AI to help
with a new game.
AI has become three things for me:
(1) A learning tool. What it is really great at is understanding my
questions when I don’t have the proper terminology. Because of this
it can give me a starting point for answers. It is also really
fantastic for exposing me to unknown unknowns; probably the most
important thing it does for me.
(2) A tool to do boring or tedious things that I can do but slow me
down. I’ve found it good enough at a variety of things like
commenting code, writing a config file (that I usually edit), or
other text-based adventures.
(3) Search. Just like (1), because it understands what I’m actually
after, it is irrelevant if I know what a thing is actually called. I
also let it filter things for me, make recommendations, etc.
I think you can let it think for you, but… why would you? It’s
not as smart as you. It’s just faster and knows more things. It’s
like an FPU for the CPU of your brain.
roenxi wrote 19 hours 14 min ago:
> One thing I've noticed is many (most?) people in our cohort are
very skeptical of AI coding (or simply aren't paying attention).
I'd hope most devs are using AI heavily when coding, the last 6
months seem to have reached a level of competence in raw programming
skill somewhere around mid- or senior- level with hilarious variance
between brilliance and idiocy.
I think you might be seeing the most vocal programmers are terrified
for their future prospects and there isn't much room to reason with
them so they're let alone.
AnotherGoodName wrote 19 hours 34 min ago:
I've come to this same conclusion pretty strongly in the past few
months in particular. I actually had negative comments on my
experience with AI previously.
For all the talk of AI hitting a ceiling the latest tools have
improved greatly. I'm literally doing things in hours that'd
previously take weeks with little issue. I do of course have to think
about the prompts and break it down to a fine grained level and i
also have the AI integrated well with the IDE.
The biggest wins are the times you hit a new framework/library.
Traditionally you'd go through the 'search for code samples on usage
of new library/language/framework -> work those samples into a form
that accomplishes your task' cycle. AI is much better for this to the
extent it even often surprises me. "Oh the library has a more
straightforward way to accomplish X than i thought!".
For those who are still skeptical it's time to try it again.
aprilthird2021 wrote 17 hours 5 min ago:
> I'm literally doing things in hours that'd previously take weeks
with little issue.
What's an example of this? Some of the ones I see most are:
converting legacy code to something modern, building a greenfield
app or feature in an unfamiliar language / framework / space.
But at work I don't have these types of jobs, and I want to get
this productivity speed up, but right now I'm stuck at it helps a
lot but not turning weeks of work into hours, so trying to get
there
AnotherGoodName wrote 16 hours 32 min ago:
I recently had a need to create educational animations. These
were programmatically created using the Manim library in Python.
I'm a mobile dev by trade. The best interaction i had recently
was with Python and the Manim library specifically which are not
my area of expertise. This was a series of "Create an animation
that shows X with a graph of the result over variables Y". AI
gave a one shot successful results with good coding practices for
all of this. I could have spent a week coming up to speed on that
library and re-remembering all the Python syntax or i could have
fought against doing it at all but instead, one hour of
prompting, "here it is boss, done".
I had similar results doing some updates to the app itself too
fwiw. Android dev has a lot of boilerplate. "Create a new screen
to show a list of images in a recycler view". Everyone who's done
Android knows the boilerplate involved in what i just stated.
Again 1 shot results. Unlike the above this is something i know
how to do well, i just didn't want to type 100's of lines of
boilerplate.
aprilthird2021 wrote 15 hours 38 min ago:
Would that have taken you weeks though?
I imagine reading through a few articles and examples could
have gotten you there. I never heard of Manim before but found
these pretty quickly: [1] [2] I am not trying to pick at you,
but it feels like what I am currently able to do with AI, shave
off a few hours, but not weeks.
I agree with you the ease of cutting through boilerplate is a
big win, but it also doesn't register as weeks worth of work
for me...
[1]: https://docs.manim.community/en/stable/examples.html
[2]: https://manimclass.com/plot-a-function-in-manim/
AnotherGoodName wrote 15 hours 15 min ago:
A single graph might save hours. A full feature series where
each graph type has yet new syntax to learn is indeed much
more. Especially when there's followups, "let's make the
graph move over the left half of the screen and then the next
animation shows in the right half?" which again were one shot
done in minutes with AI. For me just to gain the context of
how to move the animation into the left half smoothly and
then move all animations that were drawn into a separate
animation file into this file and reposition each element
from that second file into the right half of the screen would
have probably taken a day.
We tend to underestimate engineering time generally. So i
wouldn't look at the above and say "that seems doable in X
hours". I stand strongly by my assertion that it saved me a
week (at least!) all up.
skaisbzbsn wrote 18 hours 57 min ago:
> I do of course have to think about the prompts and break it down
to a fine grained level
This is where I’ve found usefulness falling off. Code is much
more succinct and exact than English. I was never slowed down by
how fast I could type (and maybe some are? I’ve watched people
finger type and use the mouse excessively) but by how fast I could
understand the existing systems. By the time I could write an
expressive prompt in English I might as well have made the changes
myself.
I’ve found it enormously useful as google on steroids or as a
translator (which many changes that require code often end up
being).
golergka wrote 7 hours 17 min ago:
> This is where I’ve found usefulness falling off. Code is much
more succinct and exact than English.
Depends on how you use English. If you describe all the details
down to the last line of requirements — then, yeah. But
actually, a lot of requirements are typical and can be compressed
to things like "make a configuration page following this config
type" and LLM will figure it out and put checkboxes for booleans,
drop-downs for enums, and all the boilerplate that goes with
them. Sometimes you have to correct this output, but it's still
much faster than describing the whole thing.
jpcom wrote 18 hours 58 min ago:
Which IDE are you using?
AnotherGoodName wrote 18 hours 48 min ago:
The jetbrains collection which now have claud built in with a
subscription option.
qsort wrote 20 hours 0 min ago:
I commented on this before, I'm in this weird "opinion arbitrage"
spot where I'm relatively skeptical by HN standards but I'm actually
pushing for more usage at work. Hell, I'm typing this while I wait
for Claude to be done.
The reason for my skepticism is the delta between what they're being
sold as and what they actually do. All AI solutions, including agents
(especially agents!), are effectively worse-than-worthless without
guidance from someone experienced. There's very little that's
"autonomous" about them, in fact.
The very guy who coined the term "vibe coding" went on stage
effectively saying we're putting the carriage before the horse!
Omitting the important caveat that while they are fantastic tools
they need to be restrained a lot is effectively lying.
mumbisChungo wrote 14 hours 2 min ago:
It's the same problem that crypto experiences. Almost everyone is
propagating lies about the technology, even if a majority of those
doing so don't understand enough to realize they're lies.
I'd argue there's more intentional lying in crypto and less value
to be gained, but in both cases people who might derive real
benefit from the hard truth of the matter are turning away before
they enter the door due to dishonesty/misrepresentation.
zacharycohn wrote 16 hours 57 min ago:
My stance has long been that LLMs are currently worse than the
evangelists are claiming they are, but are significantly better
than the detractors and skeptics think they are.
Like most things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. But unlike
many things, they are changing and advancing rapidly, so it's
current state is not the resting state.
kordlessagain wrote 19 hours 55 min ago:
My opinion is that it's about the tools you use. Bad tools, bad
agentic behavior.
sitkack wrote 19 hours 8 min ago:
Better spoons, better food.
brookst wrote 18 hours 54 min ago:
Spoons are tools you use to consume food; a better analogy
would be better kitchen, better food. An induction range,
quality good, nice pans, nice knives will definitely enable
higher quality food. Of course you can still make crap if you
don’t know what you’re doing, the point is that the tools
raise the ceiling for someone who does know what they’re
doing.
prairieroadent wrote 10 hours 23 min ago:
one level deeper... better farm (soil, water, .etc), better
food... also you can easily ruin food in a top-of-the-line
kitchen by over-processing, adding tainted spices, excessive
heat, .etc
squidbeak wrote 19 hours 6 min ago:
Owners of silver spoons tend to eat pretty well.
danielbln wrote 20 hours 6 min ago:
In addition, there is a learning curve and a skill ceiling that is
deceptively higher than people think. Also, running Claude Opus in
some tight agentic harness will give very different results than
asking GPT-4o in the browser and copy/pasting stuff around.
M4v3R wrote 20 hours 10 min ago:
> the leverage you get out of it is exponentially proportional to the
quality of your instructions, the structure of your interactions, and
the amount of attention you pay to the outputs
Couldn't say it better myself. I think many people get discouraged
when they don't get good results without realizing that for good
results you need to learn how to interact with these AI agents, it's
a skill that you can improve by using them a lot. Also some AI tools
are just better than others for certain use cases, you need to find
one that works best with what you're doing.
When it finally clicks for you and you realize how much value you can
extract from these tools there's literally no coming back.
imiric wrote 11 hours 55 min ago:
It's not about learning how to interact with AI agents. The only
required skills for working with these tools are basic reading and
writing skills any decent English speaker would have. Knowing how
and when to provide additional context and breaking down problems
into incremental steps are common workflows within teams, not
something novel or unique to LLMs.
"Prompt" or "context engineering" is what grifters claim they can
teach for a fee.
What does make a difference is what has been obvious since the
advent of LLMs: domain experts get the most out of them. LLMs can
be coaxed into generating almost any thinkable output, as long as
they're prompted for it. Only experts will know precisely what to
ask for, what not to ask for, and whether or not the output aligns
with their expectations. Everyone else is winging it, and their
results will always be of inferior quality, until and if these
tools improve significantly.
What's dubious to me is whether experts really gain much from using
LLMs. They're already good at their job. How valuable is it to use
a tool that can automate the mechanical parts of what they do,
while leaving them with larger tasks like ensuring that the output
is actually correct? In the context of programming, it's like
pairing up with a junior developer in the driver seat who can type
really quickly, but will confidently make mistakes or will blindly
agree with anything you say. At a certain point it becomes less
frustrating and even faster to type at normal human speeds using
boring old tools yourself.
dragonwriter wrote 11 hours 50 min ago:
> It's not about learning how to interact with AI agents. The
only required skills for working with these tools are basic
reading and writing skills any decent English speaker would have.
This is flatly untrue, just as the same would be untrue about
getting the most out of people (but the behavioral quirks of AI
systems and the ways to deal with them do not follow human
psychology, so while it is inaccurate in the same way as with
people, the skills needed are almost entirely unrelated.)
hnaccount_rng wrote 20 hours 31 min ago:
How many tokens did you use up and what did you pay for them?
M4v3R wrote 20 hours 18 min ago:
I can't give you the token count because I didn't really track that
(Augment Code does not give you detailed token stats) and I'm not
paying per token - I use the Developer plan on Augment Code ($50/mo)
and Pro plan on Cursor ($20/mo). Didn't pay for additional usage and
I have requests to spare on both of them.
As far as stats go from the provider dashboards I see:
- 7667 lines of Agent Edits accepted on Cursor
- 105 messages (prompts) on Augment Code
bix6 wrote 20 hours 32 min ago:
Excited to try this when I’m on a computer. Thanks for sharing
everything!
edgarneto wrote 21 hours 1 min ago:
This is a pretty cool game! I love the twists of rewinding time and
playing with the keyboard. It would look pretty cool on Reddit, with a
level builder. Redditors could build levels to challenge each other and
see who can reach a highscore on each of the UGC levels. Check out
Flappy Goose and Build It on Reddit to see some examples.
M4v3R wrote 20 hours 13 min ago:
Thanks! The game actually supports gamepads too but I didn't have
enough time to put in proper instructions for that.
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