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My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

simonwillison.net

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Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#152

Did you understand the implementation or just that it produced a result? I would hope an LLM could spit out a cobbled form of answer to a common interview question. Today a colleague presented data changes and used an LLM to build a display app for the JSON for presentation. Why did they not just pipe the JSON into our already working app that displays this data? People around me for the most part are using LLMs to e…

I scanned the code and understood what it was doing, but I didn't spend much time on it once I'd seen that it worked.

If I'm writing code for production systems using LLMs I still review every single line - my personal rule is I need to be able to explain how it works to someone else before I'm willing to commit it.

I wrote a whole lot more about my approach to using LLMs to help write "real" code here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#153

Did pretty well with a boggle clone. I like that it tries to do a single html file (I didn't ask for that but was pleasantly surprised). It didn't include dictionary validation so needed a couple of prompts. Touch selection on mobile isn't the greatest but I've seen plenty worse https://chat.z.ai/space/z0gcn6qtu8s1-art https://chat.z.ai/s/74fe4ddc-f528-4d21-9405-0a8b15a96520

Cool — if only diagonals were easier. ;-) (Hopefully I'm being constructive here.)

Yep I tried to have it improve that but actually didn't use the word 'diagonal' in the prompt. I bet it would have done better if I had..

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#154

Apart from using a Mac, what can you use for inference with reasonable performance? Is a Mac the only realistic option at the moment?

you are almost certainly better off renting GPUs, but i understand self-hosting is an HN touchstone

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

coding? they are coding models? what specific tasks is one performing better than the other?

glm 4.5 is not a coding model

It may not be code-only, but it was trained extensively for coding:

> Our base model undergoes several training stages. During pre-training, the model is first trained on 15T tokens of a general pre-training corpus, followed by 7T tokens of a code & reasoning corpus. After pre-training, we introduce additional stages to further enhance the model's performance on key downstream domains.

From my notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/28/glm-45/

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#156
post #91
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The subjects in the study you are referencing also believed that they were more productive with it. What metrics do you have to convince yourself you aren't under the same illusionary bias they were?

Yesterday I used ffmpeg to extract the frame at the 13 second mark of a video out as a JPEG. If I didn't have an LLM to figure that out for me I wouldn't have done it at all.

LLM's still give subpar results with ffmpeg. For example when I asked Sonnet to trim a long video with ffmpeg, it put the input file parameter before the start time parameter, which triggers an unnecessary decode of the video file. [1]

Sure, use the LLM to get over the initial hump. But ffmpeg's no exception to the rule that LLM's produce subpar code. It's worth spending a couple minutes reading the docs to understand what it did so you can do it better, and unassisted, next time.

[1] https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html#:~:text=ss%20position

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#157

Is there any website to see the minimum/recommended hardware required for running local LLMs? Much like 'system requirements' mentioned for games.

This can be a useful resource too:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#158
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

glm 4.5 is not a coding model

It may not be code-only, but it was trained extensively for coding: > Our base model undergoes several training stages. During pre-training, the model is first trained on 15T tokens of a general pre-training corpus, followed by 7T tokens of a code & reasoning corpus. After pre-training, we introduce additional stages to further enhance the model's performance on key downstream domains. From my notes here: https://sim…

yes, all reasoning models currently are, but it’s not like ds coder or qwen coder

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#160

Aside that space invaders from scratch is not representative for real engineering, it will be interesting to see what the business model for Anthropic will be if I can run a solid code generation model on my local machine (no usage tier per hour or week), let’s say, one year from now. At $200 per month for 2 years I can buy a decent Mx with 64GB (or perhaps even 128GB taking residual value into account)

The frontier models are always going to tempt you with their higher quality and quicker generation, IMO.
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