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#claude#why#project#write#code#don#kind#thing#something#assembly
Discussion (47 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
> One commit per verified piece of work, with the acceptance numbers in the commit message
Project: One single commit: "ZX Desk, first release"
???
In business, there's this saying that "when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric". I guess LLMs also make that true for hobby projects that used to make up a good portion of HN. We'd celebrate a project like that not because it's useful, but because it's a triumph of human ingenuity and a celebration of a personal achievement for the author. But now, it isn't, so is it still something we ought to celebrate?
My best theory would be it's something that was built as like a novelty/proof of concept, that a current state of the art LLM can do tedious tasks like assembly on a ridiculously old/low resource platform and turn out something that actually looks coherent. I don't personally know a lot of people who enjoy building large things in assembly but LLMs aren't bothered by doing tedious tasks. Due to the tiny size of the thing it can probably very rapidly iterate on "this doesn't work, change a thing, run it again" thousands of times.
Why not? The author wanted it, and had wanted it for about four decades since trying and failing as a child due to the difficulty of the task. If you’re in a certain frame of mind, then “why bring it to life?” can be directed at any kind of cultural work to negate it out of existence.
The default state is that things don't get done unless we have a reason. So there is a motivation at play and it's OK to inquire about it, especially if the author appears to be cagey about how the project came to be.
I can intuitively understand the motivation for doing it if it helps you (learn, grow, make money, etc). I can also understand the motivation for doing it if it helps others. But on the face of it, neither applies to asking an LLM to build something completely abstract like this.
If your answer is "it was the author's childhood dream", fair. However, I think we upvote it in large part because of the historical association of a "crazy 8-bit software project" with "that took perseverance and skill and our community should reward it" - and that link is severed now.
I think all AI projects should die, but if your question is aimed as to "why to publish it on github", then why not? Others could look at the code and learn from it (perhaps); and it is easier to distribute it that way too, in many cases. So I don't fully agree with the assumption that it would be automatically useless. Personally I won't use AI slop projects. It already annoys me to no ends that AI skynet successfully took over ruby development. I don't feel like even giving any feedback, as a few ruby devs such as Hiroshi Shibata, only interact with other beings via AI slop spam via claude; suddenly newly gained "perfect english language skills". It is all so fake now when AI infiltrates projects.
Have been for a while, it's exhausting.
> The clock you can trust
*Bleh*
That is of course your right.
> You sound like the fun police and someone who should stick to programming in raw, unadulterated machine code rather than using any kind of assistance.
You felt the need to write that so allow me keep the response short: go fuck yourself.
Was this, then, done to impress others rather than enrich the coders skills and experience?
The futuristic equivalent of pressing the “demo” button on old electronic keyboard and pretending to play
Also, looking at the code, the whole project looks vibe coded, no human would write such comments. Everything in a single git commit also looks "suspicious". It's cool that LLMs can write Z80 asm now, but yeah "labour of love"... tsk tsk tsk...
Which, if you think about it too hard, says something slightly profound and a little disturbing about identity…
I do recall a whole era when using a GUI was considered cheating and denigrated as a "point and drool" interface (a play on "point and click").
Is using a combine cheating in farming? Is a nail gun or using prefab wall sections cheating in home construction? Is a 3D printer cheating in fabrication? If someone prints something with a 3D printer, do we say "you didn't make that, the printer did!"
I find it weird for people who like technology to be so averse to tools that automate labor since that is literally what all technology is, and a tool to automate intellectual labor is literally what a computer is. A machine is a thing whose purpose is to provide leverage to amplify human effort and more rapidly realize human intent in some domain.
Maybe it comes from a category error. AI is kind of a hand-wavey term, since most people think it means the thing is sentient. It's not. It has zero intent, zero motivation, zero ability to choose anything not already in its training data, and it will go precisely where its context window (and training data) guide it. It's a tool, a machine, and like any other machine it is set in motion by the user and guided by the user. The "choices" it makes are latent in its data or structure, or implied by its prompt. (Yes sometimes they can be surprising, but that's true of all complex machines.)
Actual sentient AI does not exist. It might someday but it does not today. I suspect it requires a very different kind of system with continuous learning, dynamical state, and feedback, and a goal function tied somehow to thermodynamics in the real physical world the way ours is, but that's pure hypothesis on my part. We don't even have rigorous definitions for such things.
I feel like vibecoded projects need Claude to pick up on a sense of ‘this is just me messing around’, and a project like this where there does appear to be genuine digging into the art of performance tuning Z80 assembly needs Claude to understand ‘this is impractical hacking for hacking’s sake not groundbreaking research’
I don’t have a problem with projects which are, essentially ‘Claude and I burned a lot of tokens for giggles to see just how far you can push something’. But the write up needs to reflect that spirit.
Would take three times the token cost to actually get it to fight with itself in the correct voice tone.
Honestly think self hosted models is more valuable here. At least then one can train it with the right system prompt.
Wow!!!!
Obviously at that age my knowledge of coding and window managers wasn't exactly deep and i mostly only had seen other OS from magazines. I don't think I even knew what 'drag-n-drop' was and was a bit confused at what the Trash bin should do (i loaded code from tapes).
Good times i guess :)
and there's a detailed write up
https://aryx.github.io/assets/pdfs/Windows-7.pdf
Forth might work better than C, but tbh, assembly code is more straightforward and easier to read than Forth ;)
Instead I hear about the great time Claude had being prompted to do it.