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Long-form comments in the code are AI-written too, so I assume the whole thing is vibecoded. I guess my question is why. This is obviously not a piece of softwa

• shevy-java 13d ago
  > why bring it to life? I think all AI projects should die, but if your question is aimed as to "why to publish it on github", then why not? Others could look at the code and learn from it (perhaps); and it is easier to distribute it that way too, in many cases. So I don't fully agree with the assumption that it would be automatically useless. Personally I won't use AI slop projects. It already annoys me to no ends that AI skynet successfully took over ruby development. I don't feel like even giving any feedback, as a few ruby devs such as Hiroshi Shibata, only interact with other beings via AI slop spam via claude; suddenly newly gained "perfect english language skills". It is all so fake now when AI infiltrates projects.
  • gizajob 13d ago
    You’ve officially reached the “you pesky kids get off my lawn” stage in your interest in computing.
  • kejdjejxjejdj 13d ago
    Not all AI-assisted projects are AI-slop. The fact that you think so only tells me that you’re deeply insecure about your knowledge of a subject that you’re interested in.
• gizajob 13d ago
  >Why bring it to life? Why not? The author wanted it, and had wanted it for about four decades since trying and failing as a child due to the difficulty of the task. If you’re in a certain frame of mind, then “why bring it to life?” can be directed at any kind of cultural work to negate it out of existence.
  • in_absentia 13d ago
    > Why not? You're only addressing one half of my argument. The answer to this is obvious: the default state is that things don't get done unless we have a reason. So there is a motivation at play and it's perfectly OK to inquire about it, especially if the author appears to be cagey about how the project came to be. If your answer is "it was the author's childhood dream", fair. But that brings me to the second half of the argument: I think we upvote this article in large part because of the historical association of a "crazy 8-bit software project" with "something that took perseverance and skill and our community should reward it". That link is severed now.
    • gizajob 13d ago
      Even a cursory flick through the GitHub page until you reach “Why” shows that to be the answer.
    • alt227 13d ago
      > The default state is that things don't get done unless we have a reason. What about art? People make art and inventions just for the hell of it and to satisfy come itch. Whether or not other people then like it or find it useful is subjective and up to the individual. IMO taking away peoples right to make stuff for no reason and enjoy doing it is to take away our humanity. I upvoted the article because it brought me some nostalgia and entertained me for a bit while I played with it and knowing how to code a spectrum myself, marvelled at the complexity of the code and the project itself. Maybe people have more reasons to enjoy things than your narrow viewpoint allows for?
    • kejdjejxjejdj 13d ago
      > But that brings me to the second half of the argument: I think we upvote this article in large part because of the historical association of a "crazy 8-bit software project" with "something that took perseverance and skill and our community should reward it". That link is severed now. There’s the problem: you are assuming everyone else thinks in elitist terms like you. It still is a crazy 8-bit software project. It still rather impressive and fun to see. Your “historical reason” reads a lot more like whining than anything else and it does come across as a display of insecurity. AI is just a freaking tool. The dev used to tool to bring his vision to life. That’s the extent of it. Stop making such a fuss over something that quite literally was just made for fun. Let people have fun in peace. Let people enjoy things in peace.
• derac 13d ago
  AI assisted or not, you have no idea how much of his personal effort went into the project.
  • deleted 13d ago
    [deleted]
  • mzi 13d ago
    Nothing else than a bit of prompting went in to this.
    • grugagag 13d ago
      How about the desire to steer LLMs to a point of their choosing? LLMs wouldn't do this by themselves...
    • jameshart 13d ago
      If you’re familiar with the way in which documentation artifacts like this fall out of a Claude project, you will recognize that every place where Claude says ‘this changes everything’ or ‘this is the load bearing insight’ most likely resulted from a human looking at what Claude had done, and redirecting it towards a more fruitful line of inquiry. When Claude gets ‘excited’ about a thing like ‘we figured out which clock measurement approach helps us actually optimize performance’ - excited enough to explain it in this level of detail - it usually results from the user pulling Claude out of a rabbit hole where it was going about things the wrong way.
    • alt227 13d ago
      "A bit of prompting" is subjective, and can indeed take a lot of work to craft accurate prompts which produce genuinely useful output.
    • kejdjejxjejdj 13d ago
      I think you severely lack in domain knowledge if you think “nothing else than a bit of prompting went in to this”.
• dainiusse 13d ago
  For the fun of it. Why not. And otoh, isn't it impressive that llm's can do it.
• walrus01 13d ago
  > I guess my question is why. This is obviously not a piece of software anyone will ever use. My best theory would be it's something that was built as like a novelty/proof of concept, that a current state of the art LLM can do tedious tasks like assembly on a ridiculously old/low resource platform and turn out something that actually looks coherent. I don't personally know a lot of people who enjoy building large things in assembly but LLMs aren't bothered by doing tedious tasks. Due to the tiny size of the thing it can probably very rapidly iterate on "this doesn't work, change a thing, run it again" thousands of times.
• reaperducer 13d ago
  If the author didn't do this for themselves - to learn, to show off their skills - then why bring it to life? Likes. Clicks. Vanity. Being able to list GitHub on a resume. The usual stuff we get from anything adjacent to A.I. We went to the moon with slide rules. Now we boil the oceans for "likes."
  • kejdjejxjejdj 13d ago
    What do you even mean by this? Can’t things be made just for fun? Can’t people be proud of things they did for enjoyment only? How is displaying a project on your GitHub “vanity”? Why shouldn’t they display it proudly? Why shouldn’t they put it on their resume?
    • reaperducer 12d ago
      Can’t people be proud of things they did for enjoyment only? Absolutely. But he didn't do it. He asked Claude to do it for him. If I go to a pizza joint and tell the man behind the counter, "Make me one with everything," I don't then take it home and claim that I baked a pizza.
      • kejdjejxjejdj 12d ago
        No, you did not make the pizza, but you have the wherewithal to order it, to think of what you wanted. You don’t get to claim you made the pizza, but you made the order for your pizza dinner. And honestly, if you have any experience at all working with AIs, then you should know very well that it is not anything like ordering a pizza. I can guarantee you the author did work on it, plan it, rethought parts of it, specced it out, tested it, and worked a lot to make it come to life. So no, you wouldn’t have made the pizza because all you had to do was order it, but you cannot just say “write a GUI for the ZX Spectrum” and wait at your table for it to come toasty out of the oven. Bad analogy. Bad way of thinking. Bad behaviour. All on you.
        • reaperducer 12d ago
• kejdjejxjejdj 13d ago
  > If the author didn't do this for themselves - to learn, to show off their skills - then why bring it to life? Why not? What if the person just wanted to see if it could be done and how it would look like, but wasn’t interested in the nitty-gritty bits in between? There’s so much elitism and “you can’t sit with us” energy here that I feel like I just lost 4 decades of my life just reading this—and not in a good way. Yeah, there certainly is AI slop. But there’s also very good uses of AI. So how about we stop shaming people for just building things they wanted to build using the tools at their disposal? > But now, it isn't, so is it still something we ought to celebrate? Why isn’t it? Don’t “having an idea and acting on it” count anymore? You guys seem so utterly insecure it’s depressing.
• leidenfrost 13d ago
  > then why bring it to life? Like many things in life, the answer is just "because I want to" and "because I can". Not everything has to be a linear progression or a level-up mechanic like a mmorpg. Sometimes you want to create something out of creativity and you like seeing it done. The same way a painter wants to create something, not to show off skills, not to linearly progress onto something, but because they like making something out of nothing.
  • ndiddy 13d ago
    Well it’s more like commissioning art than making art yourself right? You want a painting of some specific thing to exist, so you find an artist you like and pay them to make it. It’s not art, but I recently commissioned a translation of a manga that I wanted to read in English. The process was very similar to working with an LLM, just more expensive and the turn length was longer (and of course the output quality is much higher than an LLM generated scanlation would be at this point in time). I would pay for a chapter, he would send me a draft, we would go back and forth iterating on romanization and fixing typos until I was happy, then we’d move onto the next chapter. I achieved my goal of having the manga readable in English when it wasn’t before, but I wouldn’t call it my project.
    • badsectoracula 13d ago
      A very significant difference is that AIs are programs, not people. Perhaps it might be because i don't use any cloud LLMs, but the LLMs i use are all just data for a program running on my computer just like any other program and i don't really see them as any different than running -say- Bison to write a lexer or whatever (sure, Bison gives you the same output for the same input, but that is because LLM inference engines just add some randomness in the mix as that works better for the overall output - again, not any different than, say, rendering a 3D scene with a pathtracer that takes random samples: same input, different output -- or really any other thing that involves randomness). That the combo of an LLM inference engine and weights kinda writes like a human and works with text in natural languages doesn't mean it is any different than any other piece of software. I mean, i don't know about you but personally i'm not a fan of the idea of commissioning GCC to compile my code or Awk to process my text - even if i suspect there are business people out there who would love it :-P
• jameshart 13d ago
  > If the author didn't do this for themselves - to learn, to show off their skills - then why bring it to life? Isn’t wanting a thing to exist reason enough? It’s a bit like seeing someone post an instagram photo of them eating a cake they made, and saying ‘why? Why did you make this cake? Are you trying to learn, or show off your skills?’ Maybe they.. just wanted to eat a cake? I swear the instagram ‘look at me’ culture has broken people’s ability to just do a thing because they can.