>An ECS framework, 1-2 weeks That gave me a good chuckle. Yeah look, you can change your data layout to be in more of an ECS format, make some optimizations and call it a day; but in reality you're still going to be pretty far from the real thing. I can say this because I've been working on one for some months now, of course I'm going for a production build and also to turn it into a Unity asset that's worthy of bein…
Have you seen where he’s using it though? His GBA Mario 64 port is one of the most impressive homebrew projects I’ve seen in years.
Writing toy software is a joy
311–318 of 318 posts
Re: Writing toy software is a joy
#312I quite enjoy the spirit of the article, and I believe joy in programming has become even more important in the AI agent coding age we're leaving. However, am I the only one finding those time estimates way too short? I'm not the fastest programmer on Earth, but I'm not the slowest either, and I think most of those projects would take me a lot more time than those estimates, specially if I'd be working only 2-3 hours…
I mean regex is incredibly powerful. 5 days?!?!
Re: Writing toy software is a joy
#313I quite enjoy the spirit of the article, and I believe joy in programming has become even more important in the AI agent coding age we're leaving. However, am I the only one finding those time estimates way too short? I'm not the fastest programmer on Earth, but I'm not the slowest either, and I think most of those projects would take me a lot more time than those estimates, specially if I'd be working only 2-3 hours…
I think that if you interpret "X days" as "24*X hours" this list becomes much more realistic.
Re: Writing toy software is a joy
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try perplexity — I found it to be very good at digging up information. It became a nearly complete replacement for web searches at this point.
This. I was skeptical at first, but it is indeed good at searching and answering questions without! That said, I still have to double-check results for niche queries or about stuff that is relatively new. Sometimes, the "sources" for the answers are just someone's opinions — unsubstantiated by any facts — on an old Reddit post that's only tangentially related to the topic. And sometimes, you simply know that manual s…
Isn't that the nature of the web?
I mean, that's exactly what I expect from web searches, so as long as you don't consider the fancy-looking [1] citations "scientific", it just digs up the same information, but summarized.
I don't expect miracles: Perplexity does the same things I've been doing, just faster. It's like a bicycle I guess.
Re: Writing toy software is a joy
#315> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate Am I the only one using LLMs as if they were a search engine? So before LLMs I was searching on Google things like "pros cons mysql mongodb". I would read the official document…
Basically, if you use agentic tools (not just to look things up or get surface level answers, but write your code for you), then it's quite likely that your brain no longer does as much heavy lifting as it would have before, nor does anything you do to solve the issues you're working with have much staying power.
Over time, this will decrease our cognitive capabilities in regards to specific things, very much how the same has largely happened with language syntax knowledge thanks to various IDEs and language servers, auto-complete and so on, you no longer need to memorize as much, so you don't.
While outsourcing some of that doesn't seem too bad, it's hard to tell what will happen to our critical thinking skills in the long term, since we're not just getting rid of some technical implementation details, but making the tool do a lot of thinking for us. All while screwing over those who don't use these tools, because they have to deal with the full friction of solving the problems.
Re: Writing toy software is a joy
#316Re: Writing toy software is a joy
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you do a web search and find a random blog post full of spelling errors and surrounded by ads, you're not going to trust that at the same level as a Stack Overflow post with a hundred upvotes, or an article with a long comment thread on HN. But an LLM digests everything, and then spits out information with the same level of detail, same terminology, and same presentation regardless of where it came from. It strips…
I agree and am perfectly happy using it as fuzzier web search, because it works really well for me. Finding references is often my main goal, but other times I just want some quick facts, in which case I'll be as thorough with checking as I would when reading a random blog with spelling errors.
Personally, I want the exact opposite: web search to go back to how it was 10-15 years ago, with deterministic search syntax, granular include/exclude syntax, boolean parsing, and absolutely no "did you mean?"s.
Re: Writing toy software is a joy
#318> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate Am I the only one using LLMs as if they were a search engine? So before LLMs I was searching on Google things like "pros cons mysql mongodb". I would read the official document…
I think one of the major issues I (and others) have with LLM's as search is they are heavily biased towards outdated data. The other day I was trying to have it get me the most updated versions of X, X, X from an old project. I tried several providers and all of them without exception gave me an "upgrade" to an older version than was in the project for at least 1 item(by years). I'm sure they are choosing LTS release…
Ask it to generate a docker compose file and it will put a "Version:XX" at the top all the time even though its been deprecated for years.
In go it loves to suggest using io.util even though its also been deprecated for years. I even have it as a rule to "never use io.util" in cursor.