We need to start putting guardrails on hn to not allow those esoteric projects to be published.
Before ai, it was impressive that a person has that much passion and dedication to go down the rabbit hole, and it usually comes back with some cool anacdotes that are nice to read.
Today, it's shallow, emptied out of the content.
It's not impressive that Claude wrote it, it was impressive if you have written it, OP.
> It's not impressive that Claude wrote it, it was impressive if you have written it, OP.
Do you have evidence that it's Claude written? Looking through the source it isn't clear to me, at all. Plus, even if it _was_ Claude/LLM assisted, why does that take away from the project?
It's like being offered a big mac at a fine dining restaurant. Yes, big mac is gonna taste fine, maybe you can dress it up nicely even. But the restaurant didn't make it, and you feel cheated for buying it (and in this case, wasting your time thinking someone coded it).
Something just existing isn't the same as something being made by someone with passion and effort beyond a one-shot prompt to Fable 5.
You have to remember that this forum is for people who have a passion and an intellectual interest in coding and development, and discussing such with like-minded people. Stimulating intellectual curiosity. An interest in what humans think and do is an implicit part of the experience.
An engineer vibe-coding a project generates an end product, yes, but what is there to be interested in or to discuss? Chances are said engineer isn't even capable of discussing the project in any depth. Are we going to be left discussing nothing but prompts and Claude workflows, and how we got the black box to do a thing? OK. Who cares? I guess we can all politely clap and move on.
I don't know if the posted project was written by an LLM or a human, but I have to agree with localhoster than AI has sucked a lot of the joy out of a lot of HN.
How this isn't causing an existential crisis in fellow developers, I don't understand. We're seeing our craft dissolve day by day, to the point where even our forums are filled with AI generated crap that we just don't find interesting or engaging.
> An engineer vibe-coding a project generates an end product, yes, but what is there to be interested in or to discuss? Chances are said engineer isn't even capable of discussing the project in any depth.
And this is reductive to the point of absurdity.
Everybody screaming about AI forgets the fact... you STILL need the domain knowledge. That's where the value in engineering is now.
Imagine a wanna-be game designer thinking they can fire up codex or claude and even with a few weeks and a few hundred dollars in credit, coming out the other side with a game anybody would want to play.
I saw the recent "would a slop button be useful in addition to flags?" and my immediate response was "only if I can also flag people whining about slop.
Frankly at this point, it's just as insulting to claim it's shallow and worthless just because Claude did it.
If there is a cool project that comes out the other side, who cares? I am forced to use Claude for day job, and while it's annoying, I am running at a pace that can keep up with my brain, not just what I can shit out and get tested and inevitably miss things. Because you know what's great?
When you have actual controls in place like Jira ticket integration, CI/CD steps that can be considered, but the overall change is small, how many more of those small changes do you think I can get done in a day versus before it? But hey, localhoster says it's shallow and empty of content, so it must be true.
A passion project of mine has been to develop a full decompilation and a randomizer for Neutopia. I've been working on this multiple years. I had it at a point where I had chests randomized, item grants, etc, but that kind of turned into a lame game because of how the existing Neupotia game works.
It's been stuck at 40% for just as long. I pointed codex at it, and now I'm at the at least 85-90% and will have it done within a few weeks.
Given Neutopia is a much smaller target audience, but when this project is released, it will at least as capable as http://alttpr.com/en, and more capable in some ways as random dungeon and overworld layouts are already possible, not just reusing layouts and changing chests.
Codex generated a big chunk of it, so it's clearly a horrible idea and piece of crap not worthy of localhoster here.
Exactly. But the damage is done. I find nothing anyone does in tech impresses or interests me anymore. The only things that interest me are things I’d like to also do myself. I imagine it’s probably the same for a lot of other people.
Like OK someone vibecoded an FPS in COBOL or Pokémon emerald in a web browser with web assembly? Ok good for them, piss off karma farmer.
> Like OK someone vibecoded an FPS in COBOL or Pokémon emerald in a web browser with web assembly? Ok good for them, piss off karma farmer.
Sorry, but most of these discussions reek of extreme gatekeeping. First off, neither of these things are impossibly difficult and are easily doable with some dedication by hand. LLMs simply accelerate the process, the human still has to come up with the architecture, _idea_ and plan to do something like this.
I think what we’re seeing play out in this thread is the devaluation of software engineers. If a growing number of people have the sentiment that an engineer vibecoding an idea has less value than a human doing it then that is all that will matter in the end.
That’s the inevitable result of machines being invented that can largely do our jobs. Just like how artisanal products are often prized over factory productions. The effort put in to and the organic quality of products have pretty much always been of value to consumers and appraisers. “I clicked a few buttons and look what the machine produced” will never be as impressive.
It would be nice to have screenshots. Also it’s just a single commit, did you use AI? Quoting the readme: “FPS.cob is what you get when you decide that game development is too easy nowadays”.
It’s also OK to be turned off by AI use in hobby projects and it is also OK to prefer disclosure of the use of AI in projects so I can make that choice.
This was posted on hackaday[0] last week with a link to a youtube video. In the video, the author of the project goes into depth about some of the challenges they encountered and changes they made in good technical detail.
I think the complaints in this thread are not in the spirit of HN. Let's do better.
As a few people have asked for screenshots, I spun it up. Here's a video of the basic gameplay: https://peterc.org/misc/fpscob.mp4 .. it's clunky, but it does play.
I had to get into an old tcl program for work recently and had the same thought. I wouldn't necessarily pick it today but it was kind of nice in a way that's unfamiliar to me from modern development.
We need to start putting guardrails on hn to not allow those esoteric projects to be published. Before ai, it was impressive that a person has that much passion and dedication to go down the rabbit hole, and it usually comes back with some cool anacdotes that are nice to read.
Today, it's shallow, emptied out of the content.
It's not impressive that Claude wrote it, it was impressive if you have written it, OP.
> It's not impressive that Claude wrote it, it was impressive if you have written it, OP.
Do you have evidence that it's Claude written? Looking through the source it isn't clear to me, at all. Plus, even if it _was_ Claude/LLM assisted, why does that take away from the project?
> why does that take away from the project?
It's like being offered a big mac at a fine dining restaurant. Yes, big mac is gonna taste fine, maybe you can dress it up nicely even. But the restaurant didn't make it, and you feel cheated for buying it (and in this case, wasting your time thinking someone coded it).
Something just existing isn't the same as something being made by someone with passion and effort beyond a one-shot prompt to Fable 5.
You have to remember that this forum is for people who have a passion and an intellectual interest in coding and development, and discussing such with like-minded people. Stimulating intellectual curiosity. An interest in what humans think and do is an implicit part of the experience.
An engineer vibe-coding a project generates an end product, yes, but what is there to be interested in or to discuss? Chances are said engineer isn't even capable of discussing the project in any depth. Are we going to be left discussing nothing but prompts and Claude workflows, and how we got the black box to do a thing? OK. Who cares? I guess we can all politely clap and move on.
I don't know if the posted project was written by an LLM or a human, but I have to agree with localhoster than AI has sucked a lot of the joy out of a lot of HN.
How this isn't causing an existential crisis in fellow developers, I don't understand. We're seeing our craft dissolve day by day, to the point where even our forums are filled with AI generated crap that we just don't find interesting or engaging.
> An engineer vibe-coding a project generates an end product, yes, but what is there to be interested in or to discuss? Chances are said engineer isn't even capable of discussing the project in any depth.
And this is reductive to the point of absurdity.
Everybody screaming about AI forgets the fact... you STILL need the domain knowledge. That's where the value in engineering is now.
Imagine a wanna-be game designer thinking they can fire up codex or claude and even with a few weeks and a few hundred dollars in credit, coming out the other side with a game anybody would want to play.
That's not how it works.
We need to start putting guardrails on hn to not allow those pointless comments complaining about usage of AI.
If you have nothing else to comment on then can you stop crying please?
I saw the recent "would a slop button be useful in addition to flags?" and my immediate response was "only if I can also flag people whining about slop.
Adds absolutely nothing to the discussion.
We need to start putting guardrails on hn to not allow those pointless comments complaining about usage of peepee poop
Could you stop evacuating your bladder and bowels? Puuuuhfleas
As OP: I _didn’t_ write it. I’m not the author. I just thought it was neat.
But thanks for the accusation.
Frankly at this point, it's just as insulting to claim it's shallow and worthless just because Claude did it.
If there is a cool project that comes out the other side, who cares? I am forced to use Claude for day job, and while it's annoying, I am running at a pace that can keep up with my brain, not just what I can shit out and get tested and inevitably miss things. Because you know what's great?
When you have actual controls in place like Jira ticket integration, CI/CD steps that can be considered, but the overall change is small, how many more of those small changes do you think I can get done in a day versus before it? But hey, localhoster says it's shallow and empty of content, so it must be true.
A passion project of mine has been to develop a full decompilation and a randomizer for Neutopia. I've been working on this multiple years. I had it at a point where I had chests randomized, item grants, etc, but that kind of turned into a lame game because of how the existing Neupotia game works.
It's been stuck at 40% for just as long. I pointed codex at it, and now I'm at the at least 85-90% and will have it done within a few weeks.
Given Neutopia is a much smaller target audience, but when this project is released, it will at least as capable as http://alttpr.com/en, and more capable in some ways as random dungeon and overworld layouts are already possible, not just reusing layouts and changing chests.
Codex generated a big chunk of it, so it's clearly a horrible idea and piece of crap not worthy of localhoster here.
Exactly. But the damage is done. I find nothing anyone does in tech impresses or interests me anymore. The only things that interest me are things I’d like to also do myself. I imagine it’s probably the same for a lot of other people.
Like OK someone vibecoded an FPS in COBOL or Pokémon emerald in a web browser with web assembly? Ok good for them, piss off karma farmer.
> Like OK someone vibecoded an FPS in COBOL or Pokémon emerald in a web browser with web assembly? Ok good for them, piss off karma farmer.
Sorry, but most of these discussions reek of extreme gatekeeping. First off, neither of these things are impossibly difficult and are easily doable with some dedication by hand. LLMs simply accelerate the process, the human still has to come up with the architecture, _idea_ and plan to do something like this.
It's only cool if it's in written in brainfuck via pencil and paper.
Bonus points if it's ink on paper.
Bonus points if ink and paper are hand crafted by the creator rather than the filthy casuals that rely on paper mills to make their paper for them.
Made me laugh. Thanks :)
I think what we’re seeing play out in this thread is the devaluation of software engineers. If a growing number of people have the sentiment that an engineer vibecoding an idea has less value than a human doing it then that is all that will matter in the end.
That’s the inevitable result of machines being invented that can largely do our jobs. Just like how artisanal products are often prized over factory productions. The effort put in to and the organic quality of products have pretty much always been of value to consumers and appraisers. “I clicked a few buttons and look what the machine produced” will never be as impressive.
It would be nice to have screenshots. Also it’s just a single commit, did you use AI? Quoting the readme: “FPS.cob is what you get when you decide that game development is too easy nowadays”.
Submitted a PR: https://github.com/icitry/FPS.cob/pull/6/changes. You can see a screenshot at the link.
It’s odd it’s not linked in the repo but the author made a your video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o
I have many projects with 0 commits, meaning were I to use git, it would be a single commit. It does not mean anything.
I hope for their sake that it's an agentic AI experiment.
Why the negativity?
If someone wants to have fun in COBOL, let them have fun in COBOL.
If it’s agentic fun, that’s cool. If it’s an interest in the language, that’s cool. It’s not like you have to have an ROI for a fun side project.
It’s also OK to be turned off by AI use in hobby projects and it is also OK to prefer disclosure of the use of AI in projects so I can make that choice.
This was posted on hackaday[0] last week with a link to a youtube video. In the video, the author of the project goes into depth about some of the challenges they encountered and changes they made in good technical detail.
I think the complaints in this thread are not in the spirit of HN. Let's do better.
0) https://hackaday.com/2026/06/06/a-raycast-fps-in-cobol/
As a few people have asked for screenshots, I spun it up. Here's a video of the basic gameplay: https://peterc.org/misc/fpscob.mp4 .. it's clunky, but it does play.
You know what, that is some pretty readable code.. COBOL might have been on to something there. I've gotten so used to syntax soup this is refreshing.
https://github.com/icitry/FPS.cob/blob/main/fps.cob
I had to get into an old tcl program for work recently and had the same thought. I wouldn't necessarily pick it today but it was kind of nice in a way that's unfamiliar to me from modern development.
The tcl syntax is fine. And modern tcl is fine.
But tcl 7.x and before was a pure string-based language. Everything was essentially a eval(). People would hit syntax errors on production code.
Fun, painful times.
The flip side: the interpreter is super simple and fun to write.
Tcl is still entirely stringly typed. That's never changed.
There are under-the-hood optimisations to make it less insanely slow but that only affects performance.
Tcl is a cool hack (the interpret is simple to write) but it's insane to actually use it. I wish the EDA industry would realise that.
Looks like it outputs PPM and use ffplay as a display driver:
https://github.com/icitry/FPS.cob/blob/497867bb6827bcfc32d50...
They should compile it to WASM and host it.
Doesn't run for me. Just I/O errors and quits.
Come on, we need screenshots!