aroman

I guess there are uses for that, but as a web game developer, that wouldn’t really help me. The killer feature is input and text rendering.

This is an extremely “all or nothing” take. I love computers and started programming in elementary school. I am having more fun now building software than I can remember.

I happen to love the process of building software by coordinating agents. It’s an addictive form of flow state that I enjoy a great deal - similar to the flow state I get playing real time strategy games like Age of Empires. It’s a different kind of flow state than writing code, for sure.

But to say that the only people who enjoy building software in this new way are those who hated coding, technology, or problem solving is simply untrue.

/goal is all you need

If it is common in the world of video game porting, that just shows my ignorance. I'm familiar with visual diffs in CI for e.g. web development (comparing a static component), but to do that to compare frames over time in a video game/3D environment is new to me.

There are so many more degrees of freedom, which I can see Claude handled... mipmaps, subtle differences in lighting/positioning/compositing etc.

Oh my god, and the author even supplied a "proof"[0] visual diff harness... that it replicates the original game pixel for pixel.

Just the cherry on top of great demonstration of our collective new superpower: asking computers to do something we can describe how to do, but would (probably) never take the time to do ourselves.

[0] https://github.com/terrapapagalli1516/quake-srp/tree/main/or...

ChatGPT has had ads in the product for the better part of a year now.

This very idea has been tried - and venture funded - to the tune of many millions of dollars every 6 months for the past 4 years.

The last few founders I knew working on variations of the idea finally pivoted out over the summer. It’s definitely one of those ideas that sounds great until you try building it and you realize there’s nothing there. Definitely will get funded again before the year is up!

I'd say the shift to mobile went through a similar arc into decline as the web, actually.

Newgrounds really was the golden age for web gaming. And, similar to early web, early mobile gaming also started out with nostalgia-worthy charm and heart. You're right that it's been hollowed out, but the same thing happened to web gaming after the Flash era. The social casino era is maybe its 6th reinvention, and its lowest yet.

Now that mobile gaming has been raced to the bottom and consolidated (and thanks to the dual tailwinds of AI making it easy to write code without engines and the web maturing in its 3d+networking capabilities) we're started to see a resurgence of web-based games - it's my full-time job now! Granted we still do rely on mobile apps (as web wrappers) for monetization, but that wall is crumbling rapidly.

"Most people?" Do you have a source for that claim?

Poe’s Law notwithstanding, this is a truly comical distance for a goalpost of any kind.

The reverse captcha really made me feel something in my bones. Like for a moment I was a second-class citizen of the web. I wonder if this is how it "feels" to be an LLM attempting to use the web...

I want to try Planetscale... but we're addicted to (and totally dependent on) Neon's branching model. They really got us hooked on that!

Finally, I can delete `sync-agent-docs.sh`, which recursively symlinked AGENTS.md to GEMINI.md and CLAUDE.md...

nix + LLMs is the most fun I've had with personal computing since I burned an Ubuntu live CD in middle school

Shall we also ban projects that are not authored directly in bytecode? Surely it's not really "made by hand" if you used a higher level interpreted language. But seriously: software engineering is all about leveraging abstractions/indirection where appropriate for the job to be done. It's kind of... the whole point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_softwar...

> It also seems like frontier models reached some limit, whether this is capex related, business model related or something else. Nobody knows but it's happening to all frontier labs it seems.

What’s your evidence of this? On the contrary, the large closed frontier models capability has advanced dramatically over the past 6 months… even the past 3 months…

And again the boy will cry out “the wolf is here!” But this time the wolf really will be here, and no one will believe him.

I read it as: we acted as quickly as we could once it became possible to do so, i.e., the change in control was completed. not that their special agreement carved out some maximum notice term.

I think you need to spend more time with Sol. If you think there is nothing even close to as good as Fable - my guess is you haven’t spent as much time getting as familiar with working with those models as you have with Claude’s.

Codex is more token efficient and tends to get better results than Fable with less need for extreme token burning shenanigans like 18 hours of subagents.

I spend 10+ hours a day in both agents, typically side by side. I often have them do direct “bakeoffs” from identical prompts in separate work trees. Most of the time, Sol’s work is better than Fable’s. Not always. It’s situational. But it’s certainly not the case that Fable is in a league of its own or anything.

The LLM is reasoning about estimates from its training data... which is to say, from human engineering timescales.

I suspect the labs could improve the models such that they are estimating these sorts of things but they don't prioritize doing so (or perhaps RLHF selects it away) because, as you say, it feels amazing to do a week's worth of work in an hour.

I tried Fedora Silverblue and I found its notion/implementation of immutability fairly frustrating. It’s actually the reason I went to nixOS.

It seemed to me that it was all the friction of immutability without any of the benefits of reproducibility.

What alternative have you moved on to?

Revenue, data, and stamina.

I was an early and passionate adopter and paying customer of Cursor (since 2023!), but it’s probably been 6 months since I opened it.

These days I “write” code with claude code and codex, and read/review it on GitHub. If I need to read it locally, I use a plain text editor.

Can someone help me understand what value cursor offers in 2026?

I simply do not believe the switching costs are high enough that they could eliminate those plans. The Chinese models will eat their lunch.

Right, it's about how much time the human spent - the time spent by the machine itself is irrelevant. As you rightly point out: that is why we measure programmer experience by wall clock time, not CPU time :)

No, it wouldn’t. The hours in question are human experience, not that of the agent.

Sun Tzu said: if you scrape your enemy, call it training; if your enemy scrapes you, call it an attack.

You have hundreds of hours with a model that was barely even released hundreds of hours ago?

The perception of capability varies greatly between task. For my needs for example sol xhigh consistently outperforms fable xhigh.

No. I used to use Cursor, but now my workflow is that I use an inhouse CLI tool I wrote called "bud" that wraps/seeds the harnesses per-worktree, and boots a full copy of the game so each worktree can work independently. If git worktrees solve the problem of code isolation, bud solves the problem of isolating everything else. It's about 15K lines of rust, and I use it 100 times a day or so. It's sort of a layer on top of a harness like codex/claude code.

I have 10+ of these workspaces in parallel, and I context switch between them as I get blocked on things. I manage the workspaces using `herder`, which is a terrific tmux-like tool that allows me to keep those workspaces on a nixOS machine I have at home that I SSH into via tailscale, so my agents don't stop working every time I close my laptop (it also lets me leverage that machine's computing resources instead of running dozens of servers and harnesses on my poor MacBook).