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Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

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Re: Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

#141

Post by javier2 »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #14
mgdev wrote: post #6

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 t…

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 al…

How do you integrate it with your IDE? I have used intellij for 15 years, anything worse than it's actually code-aware auto complete feels like a downgrade. ie. hallucinating APIs feels totally unnecessary when my old IDE never did that. If our projects had an orderly structure, some test coverage and a reasonable way to manage database migrations, I might let the AI a lot more loose, but alas.

Re: Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

#142

Post by cainxinth »

twalkz wrote: post #30

I'm really enjoying reading over the prompts used for development: ( https://github.com/maciej-trebacz/tower-of-time-game/blob/ma... ) 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…

> No security holes. No bugs.

A friend called me for advice on trouble he was having with an LLM and I asked “What exactly do you want the LLM to do?” He said “I want it to knock this project out of the park.” And I had to explain to him it doesn’t work that way. You can’t just ask for perfection.

I mean, you can, but you won’t get it.

Re: Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

#144

Post by [deleted] »

M4v3R wrote: post #43
stavros wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/xaksu6/on_ios_safar...

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

#146

Post by adelineJoOs »

mmastrac wrote: post #49
stavros wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, that's actually my exact bug. I didn't realize this was so hard, thank you.

I have a reasonably good solution for this project of mine you might find useful: https://grack.com/demos/adventure/ 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.

hidden input box is something I heard before from some hacker-ish old collegues - seems to be a powerful and reliable approach to store state & enable communication between components!

Re: Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

#147

Post by hombre_fatal »

M4v3R wrote: post #91
mberning wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I…

> 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.

Yeah, or 10 minutes of prompting and then 20 minutes of implementing my own flavor of the LLM's solution vs 2 hours of trial and error because I'm usually too lazy to come up with a plan.

Re: Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

#148

Post by danielbln »

M4v3R wrote: post #66
alganet wrote: post #61

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 hi…

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…

You can easily let the LLM take over committing. "create atomic conventional commits until the git workspace is clean".

I have a Claude Code session open just for commiting the state once I have a piece of work complete and working.

Re: Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

#149

Post by gwern »

stavros wrote: post #44
M4v3R wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/xaksu6/on_ios_safar...

Huh, that's actually my exact bug. I didn't realize this was so hard, thank you.

https://xkcd.com/1425/

One of the frustrating things about web dev, I find, is the staggering gulf between apparently nearly identical tasks and unpredictability of it. So often I will find myself on gwernnet asking Said Achmiz, 'this letter is a little too far left in Safari, can we fix that?' and the answer is 'yes but fixing that would require shipping our own browser in a virtual machine.' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

#150

Post by antonvs »

twalkz wrote: post #30

I'm really enjoying reading over the prompts used for development: ( https://github.com/maciej-trebacz/tower-of-time-game/blob/ma... ) 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…

> No security holes. No bugs.

You forgot “Don’t hallucinate.” Noob.

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