[HN Gopher] Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documen...
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Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole
process
I'm a software developer with 20+ years of experience but during
this time I never programmed any games, but I really wanted to for
the longest time. With the advent of AI coding agents I thought
that this is the best time to try and so I've learned a bit of
Phaser.js (a Javascript based game engine) and entered Beginner's
Jam Summer 2025 - a game jam for beginners in the game dev industry
that allows AI coding. After around 25-30 hours (working mainly
after my full-time day job) I managed to submit the game I called
"Tower of Time" (the theme of the jam was "Time Travel"). You can
play it in your browser here: https://m4v3k.itch.io/tower-of-time
The goal of this project for me was first and foremost to see if AI
coding is good enough to help me with creating something that's
actually fun to play and to my delight is turns out the answer is
yes! I decided to document the whole process for myself and others
to learn from my mistakes, so both the code AND all the prompts I
used are published on GitHub (see submission link). The art assets
are largely taken from itch.io artists who shared them for free,
with some slight touch ups. Sounds came from freesound.org. I've
also streamed parts of the process, you can watch me working on the
final stretch and submitting the finished game (warning, it's 5+
hours long): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2503428478 During this
process I've learned a lot and I want to use this knowledge in my
next project that will hopefully be more ambitious. If you have any
comments or questions I'm here to answer!
Author : M4v3R
Score : 184 points
Date : 2025-07-04 12:34 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| edgarneto wrote:
| 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:
| Thanks! The game actually supports gamepads too but I didn't
| have enough time to put in proper instructions for that.
| bix6 wrote:
| Excited to try this when I'm on a computer. Thanks for sharing
| everything!
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| How many tokens did you use up and what did you pay for them?
| M4v3R wrote:
| 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
| mgdev wrote:
| 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.
| M4v3R wrote:
| > 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:
| 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:
| > 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.)
| danielbln wrote:
| 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.
| qsort wrote:
| 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.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| My opinion is that it's about the tools you use. Bad tools,
| bad agentic behavior.
| sitkack wrote:
| Better spoons, better food.
| squidbeak wrote:
| Owners of silver spoons tend to eat pretty well.
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| zacharycohn wrote:
| 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.
| mumbisChungo wrote:
| 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.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| 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.
| jpcom wrote:
| Which IDE are you using?
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| The jetbrains collection which now have claud built in with
| a subscription option.
| skaisbzbsn wrote:
| > 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).
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| > 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:
| 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:
| 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:
|
| https://docs.manim.community/en/stable/examples.html
|
| https://manimclass.com/plot-a-function-in-manim/
|
| 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...
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| 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.
| roenxi wrote:
| > 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.
| cgriswald wrote:
| 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| > 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).
| HNArg024 wrote:
| Great game! The rewind time "skill" it's like playing an Edge of
| Tomorrow game
| laurent_du wrote:
| Very cool and I wish it lasted longer.
| freehorse wrote:
| 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:
| 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!
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| 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. :-)
|
| https://bubble-pop.oinam.com
|
| https://void.oinam.com
| mordechai9000 wrote:
| Running chrome on android and the bubbles aren't popping for
| me. Count is staying at zero. Are you open to PRs? :-)
| lvl155 wrote:
| 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.
| skybrian wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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.
| twalkz wrote:
| 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 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.
| stavros wrote:
| 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 :(
| gametorch wrote:
| > 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.
| stavros wrote:
| 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.
| gametorch wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| cootsnuck wrote:
| Have you tried with both Claude opus 4 and Gemini 2.5
| pro?
| stavros wrote:
| Opus 4, Sonnet 4, o3, o4-mini-high.
| garciasn wrote:
| 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.
| M4v3R wrote:
| 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...
| stavros wrote:
| Huh, that's actually my exact bug. I didn't realize this
| was so hard, thank you.
| mmastrac wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| That's promising, thank you! I'll ask the LLM to
| implement it.
| fragmede wrote:
| 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:
| 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): https://home.stavros.io/justone/
| mberning wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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:
| > 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.
| fallinditch wrote:
| > 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.
| recursive wrote:
| Coincidentally those seem to be strongly correlated with
| success in old fashioned application development as well.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| > 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
| jaggs wrote:
| > Where are you reading "a lot of posts" making this specific
| claim?
|
| Reddit.
| mberning wrote:
| 100x is a bold statement.
| Kiro wrote:
| You can easily get to 100x in a greenfield project but you
| will never get to 100x in a legacy codebase.
| all2 wrote:
| 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.
| barrkel wrote:
| 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.
| johnrob wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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
| Swizec wrote:
| > 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.
| ofjcihen wrote:
| Why does this and the follow up comments feel like a sneaky ad
| for this "Augment Code" tool?
| M4v3R wrote:
| 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] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44463967#44465304
| nico wrote:
| 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
| thegrim33 wrote:
| 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.
| M4v3R wrote:
| 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.
| rybosome wrote:
| 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.
| malochak wrote:
| I couldn't stop playing this game, very engaging :) Thanks!
| doddpronter wrote:
| 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
| jslakro wrote:
| I didn't find any mention to the costs spent on Claude
| M4v3R wrote:
| I've mentioned this in other replies, but I actually didn't pay
| for Claude directly, only via Cursor with their $20/mo
| subscription.
| iaw wrote:
| 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.
| colinmilhaupt wrote:
| 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/
| smusamashah wrote:
| How much time did it take start to finish?
| M4v3R wrote:
| It took about a week working on it on and off in my spare time.
| I'd say probably 25-30 hours total.
| alganet wrote:
| 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]: https://github.com/maciej-trebacz/tower-of-time-
| game/commit/...
| M4v3R wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| EwanG wrote:
| 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.
| shironandonon_ wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| Ah!! I didn't even realize I could upgrade. Thanks!
| M4v3R wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| zahirbmirza wrote:
| so cool
| iaw wrote:
| 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:
| Oh definitely. Just wait one year. Or five. Or ten. We're in it
| for a wild, wild ride.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| > 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:
| 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.
| careful_ai wrote:
| This is such a beautiful example of building from love, not
| launch metrics. The hand-crafted vibe, the commitment to retro
| aesthetics--everything about this says "built for joy." In a
| world chasing optimization and virality, projects like this feel
| grounding. Thank you for sharing it with the community.
| junon wrote:
| This entire account is AI generated comments. Huh.
| careful_ai wrote:
| I totally get the skepticism--it's everywhere right now. But
| I promise there's a human behind this keyboard. Just someone
| who still enjoys thoughtful work!!! Appreciate you keeping
| the bar high for authentic HN comments.
| Lerc wrote:
| 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.
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