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.

The clock you can trust

*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.

No, I think it’s cool AF.

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.

I only accept responses in Hex I’m afraid.

I genuinely found it funny that you thought "go fuck yourself" would be either effective or off-putting to someone 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?

why bring it to life?

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.

Why bring it to life?

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.

Why not?

You're only addressing one half of my argument. The answer to this is obvious: 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 perfectly OK to inquire about it, especially if the author appears to be cagey about how the project came to be. If your answer is "it was the author's childhood dream", fair.

But that brings me to the second half of the argument: I think we upvote this article in large part because of the historical association of a "crazy 8-bit software project" with "something that took perseverance and skill and our community should reward it". That link is severed now.

But that brings me to the second half of the argument: I think we upvote this article in large part because of the historical association of a "crazy 8-bit software project" with "something that took perseverance and skill and our community should reward it". That link is severed now.

There’s the problem: you are assuming everyone else thinks in elitist terms like you. It still is a crazy 8-bit software project. It still rather impressive and fun to see.

Your “historical reason” reads a lot more like whining than anything else and it does come across as a display of insecurity.

AI is just a freaking tool. The dev used to tool to bring his vision to life. That’s the extent of it. Stop making such a fuss over something that quite literally was just made for fun.

Let people have fun in peace. Let people enjoy things in peace.

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.

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.

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.

Why do you say it's written by AI?

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?

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.

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.

AI slop.

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.

edit: noticed the person who posted this here is not the same as the author. the author appears to have just randomly made the project public without any kind of announcement. so we don't know their intentions.

Instead I hear about the great time Claude had being prompted to do it.

I don’t think anyone is talking or even considering how much fun Claude had coming up with the code for this.

Fun is subjective. “A great time” is subjective. The author could have had bucket loads of fun discussing, architecting, rethinking, planning and bringing the project to life through Claude. Or they could have had a miserable time with Claude but just wanted to see the thing working. Maybe both? Maybe neither?

The point is: chill. AI is nothing more than a tool. A tool that requires an operator. And like every other tool in human history, it can produce bad results or wonderful results, it all depends on who’s operating it and how much domain knowledge they have.

Things aren’t so black and white. Open up your mind a little (crazy concept, I know) and just let people enjoy things.

Assembly seems overkill though.

Three rules that earned their place:

One commit per verified piece of work, with the acceptance numbers in the commit message

Project: One single commit: "ZX Desk, first release"

???

maybe they have a day job in a jurisdiction where their employer could claim ownership of the code if work was done during hours they paid for. it would be safer to scrub commit times if you’re worried about an aggressive employer.

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.

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.

That’s an absurd thing to say.

Doesn’t matter what “AI” feels or doesn’t feel. AI is a tool. You can derive as much pleasure from having an ideia, planning it, working on it from a higher level, and seeing it come to life as you do when you get down and dirty with it and do it from the low level up.

Let’s talk like adults here. Please.

You are arguing against a very well known phenomenon. Technical people often avoid getting promoted to management precisely because they love doing the thing themselves. Despite the higher potential for impact in a management position, losing the detailed view of a practitioner is a real loss. This phenomenon is less obvious in big tech because there are so many people who really wanted to be managers the whole time, but had to be engineers first or never really cared about the work, but want a promotion for the better pay.

Designing a table and letting somebody else build it can be enjoyable, too.

There are plenty of people enjoying designing, for example people who 3D print objects they design, or people designing PCBs or even entire gadgets but outsourcing production.

With LLMs, I guess a factor is how much direction you give the machine. “Build me a graphical desktop” likely isn’t very enjoyable, but I can see co-working with a LLM being enjoyable. Examples

- think of some novel UI interaction, and let the LLM code it

- spending hours to speed up the GUI or to make it use less memory

This.

Knowing your limitations of building, but being good at designing and watching somebody/something else realise your vision is incredibly satisfying.

I see it like 3D printing. Nobody can extrude molten plastic out of their bodies to make things, but the skill of designing the construction well and then watch the machine execute it is certainly a good feeling. I dont really see how this is different to designing some software verbally and prompting an ai to build it for you.

Not for me. I do like having an agent at my disposition that accelerates the way into making those little experiments a reality. A sloppy reality? Maybe. But It's just tinkering, there's no other use case for this outside of saying "So this can be done, huh? Okay time to go to for a walk".

While it's totally respectable to treat your code as your personal zen garden, I like the idea of having a highway where I can make reality anything that comes from my imagination, and also having time for family, friends, work and exercising out of sedentarism.