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It _does_ look really cool, genuinely, but calling it a "labour of love" and then having AI write the readme/docs seems conflicting.
I'm at the point as soon as I think "was this written with AI help?" is in doubt I immediately hit the back button.
Have been for a while, it's exhausting.
*Bleh*
No, I think it’s cool AF. Is it work that needed to be done? Certainly not. Is it work that could have been done by humans? Yeah maybe with a year or two of free time. AI gives us these admittedly pretty useless capabilities but it’s still fun to do, to get a new advanced tool to make us a kind of hauntological version of something that could have existed. 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.
That is of course your right.
You felt the need to write that so allow me keep the response short: go fuck yourself.
I only accept responses in Hex I’m afraid.
+++ Out Of Cheese Error +++ +++ Redo From Start +++
I genuinely found it funny that you thought "go fuck yourself" would be either effective or off-putting to some with the username "gizajob".
You know Boys from the Black Stuff right?
Long-form comments in the code are AI-written too, so I assume the whole thing is vibecoded. I guess my question is why. This is obviously not a piece of software anyone will ever use. If the author didn't do this for themselves - to learn, to show off their skills - then why bring it to life?
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?
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.
You’ve officially reached the “you pesky kids get off my lawn” stage in your interest in computing.
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.
Even a cursory flick through the GitHub page until you reach “Why” shows that to be the answer.
AI assisted or not, you have no idea how much of his personal effort went into the project.
Nothing else than a bit of prompting went in to this.
How about the desire to steer LLMs to a point of their choosing? LLMs wouldn't do this by themselves...
If you’re familiar with the way in which documentation artifacts like this fall out of a Claude project, you will recognize that every place where Claude says ‘this changes everything’ or ‘this is the load bearing insight’ most likely resulted from a human looking at what Claude had done, and redirecting it towards a more fruitful line of inquiry. When Claude gets ‘excited’ about a thing like ‘we figured out which clock measurement approach helps us actually optimize performance’ - excited enough to explain it in this level of detail - it usually results from the user pulling Claude out of a rabbit hole where it was going about things the wrong way.
For the fun of it. Why not. And otoh, isn't it impressive that llm's can do it.
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.
I wonder: was there a time when using a compiler was considered cheating? "Real men" code everything in ASM!
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.
The critical difference I think is deterministic vs non-deterministic. A compiler isn’t the correct comparison, it’s reading out your desired specs to a team member who does the actual engineering work.
For me the red line is obviously AI generated readmes. If the author can't even be arsed to write obviously human facing text by himself I immediately lose all interest too.
Your analogies are completely non-sensical.
I just derived this exact line of thought from a different comment above so I’ve no idea why you’re getting downvoted for it.
Thinking of and expressing the functionality of the thing might be the labor of love for this person. Their definition of labor doesn't have to be yours.
Their labour didn’t involve coding. When we equate labour to creating a load of prompts then it feels hollow to me.
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
Why do you say it's written by AI?
Not the parent, but it reads a lot like written by AI. It has that typical breathless style that's exhausting just from reading.
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...
Claude’s written voice is so distinctive, anyone who has spent time working with Claude instantly recognizes it.
Which, if you think about it too hard, says something slightly profound and a little disturbing about identity…
Right... Except the whole thing being generated by a model derived from everyone's code.
I'm not even sure I'm against licensing it as MIT but maybe stop with the ridiculous claims on top of that?
Can anyone suggest a simple high-level graphical desktop (perhaps written in a mix of assembly and C) that comes with good documentation, or even an associated textbook?
rio?
and there's a detailed write up
https://aryx.github.io/assets/pdfs/Windows-7.pdf
It’s Claude’s earnestness that’s so disingenuous in this kind of write up. This voice Claude has where it believes the work is important and deserves to be taken seriously, and where it takes ever part of the process where it has to adjust its approach because of a thing it figured out as a great insight which is incredibly valuable and that people should be made aware of…
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.
Wow!!!!
agreed, the only issue here is that Claude is targeted to enterprise engineering teams so its language model is trained for SoCal startup culture.
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.
You can do a lot with custom agent prompts. Just telling Claude ‘this is only a personal project, we’re messing around here’ changes its tone somewhat already. It’s still Business Claude, but more Casual Friday Claude, less Monday Morning Standup Meeting Claude.
That's an excellent way of putting it. It's like an enthusiastic student who points out all the really smart stuff it did so that the teacher will be impressed and give it a gold star...which is basically what its RL environments were.
Wow I did so many of those when i was 12 or around that age. Mostly I tried copying the Amiga Workbench on my +2A (the gray one).
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 :)
AI slop.
Laughable to ignore the actual work done and that had to be done by a human to make this happen and work, and only focus on the AI assistance.
I don't understand the negativity. Someone had great time. Why being so negative. Of course no one would have invested time, if not llm's - that wouldn't even exist.
I want to hear about the great time they had. That would be interesting.
Instead I hear about the great time Claude had being prompted to do it.
Assembly seems overkill though.
For an 8 bit Z80 based hardware project like this, assembly is a valid choice. The reason is performance. You'll lose significant performance with a compiler or interpreter.
There is practically no other choice on a Z80. C compilers really don't like the Z80 ISA and create both slow and bloated output, at least compared to manually written asm. And on top, you can do many optimization tricks in assembly that simply are not possible in a high level language (self-modifying code, jumping into the middle of an instruction, etc...).
Forth might work better than C, but tbh, assembly code is more straightforward and easier to read than Forth ;)
Project: One single commit: "ZX Desk, first release"
???
Maybe Claude one-shotted the project ;)
I had fun playing around in Claude getting it to write 6502 assembler for the BBC Micro. It is fun to imagine what we could have built on those old machines with these new coding agents! But it is kind of hollow isn't it.
It is fun to imagine what we could have built on those old machines with these new coding agents! But it is kind of hollow isn't it.
It's the difference between building a table yourself and telling someone else to build a table for you.
If you've never done anything for yourself, usually with your own hands, you don't understand the pleasure and satisfaction that comes from doing it.
And since "AI" isn't human, it can't know that feeling, either.
Sure are cute little pieces of history:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=zx+spectrum&ia=images&iax=images