Love it. Especially the random interval. Wondering if anyone has ever proposed doing this whenever you get a text or social media alert. Seems ridiculous I guess but why not?
> Ask AI for an initial version and then refactor it to match your expectations.
> Write the initial version yourself and ask AI to review and improve it.
> Write the critical parts and ask AI to do the rest.
> Write an outline of the code and ask AI to fill the missing parts.
So well put. I'm writing these on a post it note and putting it above my monitor. I held off on using agents to generate code for a long time and finally was forced to really make use of them and this is so in line with my experience.
My biggest surprises have been how much the model doesn't seem to matter (?) when I'm making the prompts appropriately narrow. Also surprised at how hard it is to pair program in something like cursor. If your prompting is even slightly off it seems like it can go from 10xing a build process to making it a complete waste of time with nothing to show but spaghetti code at the end.
Anyway long live the revolution, glad this was so technically on point and not just a no-ai rant (love those too tho).
This is like a masterclass in game design, mobile UI, wasm, character design, game dialogue and interactive paychogeography. I'm gonna show this to my kid's computer club next week. Really fantastic, bravo. Is this seriously a solo developer project??
If anyone knows of similar games / apps / software tools that I could show as examples of solo developer small scope simple UI games I'm always trying to find more..
Haven't played Obra Dinn yet (it's on my list of games to play together with my wife), but anything by its developer Lucas Pope is a masterpiece. Papers Please, while it infuriated me at times (apparently I suck at following rules and spotting differences) was just amazing. Available on mobile and PC.
I would love to play that! I love the idea of the Playdate but with a Switch that is gathering dust, I don't think I can convince my wife to let me get another handheld :')
The iOS game Tiny Wings was made by a solo developer (Andreas Illiger). I highly recommend it. It’s over a decade old now, but it just got update this year, and it still stands out in my mind as one of the best mobile games ever made.
It's so cool to see this pop up on Hacker News. And also a very cool / smart-seeming trend that could maybe play a role in a more utopian atomized art world. Whatever that means?
My favorite classic suggestion down this rabbit hole that they probably mention (pay walled) is Francis Bacon's full-insano-mode preserved studio. I didn't really get his work until I saw his studio. Fun fact they literally used a painting of his to design the chest-burster in Alien? (I just learned that somehow)
Beautiful documentation and seems like an ambitious productive journey so far.
I might have missed it but would be very curious to know more about what field the writer was / is currently working in and what a potential career switch into tech looks like right now. I transitioned to coding after almost 10 years teaching but that was before the glorious AI revolution began.
Seems like the break-into-tech narrative has changed drastically. Maybe not though, curious what others perceptions are.
I would also love to read a 2 year follow-up story that gives us an update.
This article reminds me of my own attempt to transition into software from chemistry and agriculture. Four years later I'm worried that I've poured a lot of time and effort into yet another educational program which will not help find employment. That's after two science degrees and a bunch of learning about digital design and rapid prototyping.
I see a lot of optimism in this post about how it's all going to be worth it. But I'm afraid that may not be the case as I face the cold while sleeping in my car again this fall.
Sleeping in a car isn't too bad, and must be 10_000x better than sleeping on a street. Couldn't you get thicker blankets and be ok? Cold is better than roasting in summer heat, with no way to cool down (can't leave windows down unless you want people to touch you while you sleep)
I agree with both comments here. I wonder what the plausibility of fully autonomous trucking is in the next 10-30 years...
Is there any saying that exists about overestimating stuff in the near term and long term but underestimating stuff in the midterm? Ie flying car dreams in the 50s etc.
Gates seems more calm and collected having gone through the trauma of almost losing his empire.
Musk is a loose cannon having never suffered the consequences of his actions (ie. early Gates and Jobs) and so he sometimes gets things right but will eventually crash and burn having not had the fortune of failing and maturing early on in his career(he is now past the midpoint of his career with not enough buffer to recover).
> ... but underestimating stuff in the midterm? Ie flying car dreams in the 50s etc.
We still don't have flying cars 70 years later, and they don't look any more imminent than they did then. I think the lesson there is more "not every dream eventually gets made a reality".
For anybody into prehistoric abstract symbols who hasn't encountered this, "The Signs of All Times 1988" [1] is a super interesting study. Also very readable for the majority of us who are not in the field. Pairs nicely with Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams [2] and any mid-tier Cabernet.
And just my two cents as an under-qualified former art history teacher...
It's fascinating and totally valid to try to analyze these symbols as proto-linguistic, but it can be even more interesting to imagine the cognitive roll these kinda of abstract symbols might have played outside the scope of language as we understand it.
Trying to imaging the structure of the mind and experiencing reality with a complete absence of language can be immensely mind-expanding, even just as a thought experiment. At least it was for me.
As we were taught in entoptic studies, these are not elements of a proto language, they are externalizations of the occipital/retinal that both reference the brain and reference space - together.
They are the basis for a spatial language of topological parts that have yet to be realized but does integrate with the plastic arts. ie are these the source of pictograms as language? Probably not. Is there are continuity with Kurgan or Chinese ideograms? We can't find them. Is there a continuity between counting tokens and alphabets? Yes, there's a stronger case for that.
