Here’s an example of improvement when trying to solve the label placement problem (NP-hard):
It’s also an example of something that I could not (and would not bother trying to) code up a solution / heuristic for.
I tried holding Opus's hand over a week trying to get it done with a ton of in-depth planning and manual course-correction, but it never got it to a state where it was "done" (kept struggling to differentiate between game content specific to that game versus game systems we'd want to reuse, and how to cleanly separate systems vs content when extracting).
Fable needed a little bit of hand holding but got it done in less than a day.
https://github.com/ByteTerrace/Puck
It has required constant hand holding, and there was the outage to deal with, but I can't argue with the end results. A fully deterministic recursive engine within an engine framework that includes a rendering VM, emulators, custom ROMs, and an in-game editor? Insane. Sure, it's nowhere near primetime but this kind of thing was unimaginable just a year ago.