If you are constantly churning your codebase to the point that you need to invent a system that handles your churn... then you must at least be admitting that the previous 6 refactors you wrote were not good, but NOW you have it right.
I feel that good, well designed code change by accretion, not by rewrites. Code that remains stable for a long period of time was likely better than code that needs be continuously rewritten (at least with humans writers).
But maybe this is just a human-centric view of what good code means? That LLM "slop it until it works" approach to development will have a different measure of what quality looks like?
What does that remind me of?
i really don't want to brick my camera, so the deterministic emulator stack lets me do integration tests end-to-end. if i was doing this by hand with no ai, i'd probably have to run stuff on the camera just to test it. but because ai, i get deterministic simulation testing, at the cost of needing to burn $100 of subscription on it.
ai code is more like clay you gotta continuously keep shaping over time, but you can also get very very far, very quickly if you decide the code itself doesn't matter and all you care about is results.
Similar to your camera, we would never have been arsed with doing that much work were it not for LLM vibbing. It allowed us to get something working (sufficiently) very quickly.
At what point of maintaining this code would it be cheaper for me to actually find underlying patterns and program this myself with some actual thought, rather than continuously "shaping the clay" of my LLM slop? These questions keep me awake at night (not really), and probably predict the future of software engineering!
Because asset-ripping is a pretty widespread, well documented practice in gaming - it's how a lot of modding communities figure out and expand on the games they mod.
A quick search shows WH40K: Rogue Trader is built on Unity too, so any number of existing Unity-specific asset-ripping tools should have worked for your purposes. Though I should say I've never actually dabbled much with modding Rogue Trader, so maybe I'm wrong?
We also just wanted to try some modestly sized project with an LLM. Neither of us had any real experience doing any of the things we ended up doing for that project (other than my making the website and him understanding the graphics pipeline).
So, unfortunately, no, there was no specific reason I suspect.
https://stephencagle.dev/posts-output/2026-01-30-warhammer-4... is my best recollection of the thought process.
Imagine that you have git but you don't even have a concept of programming language more complex than assembly. All your commits and git history are pure assembly. Everything is cool, until one day C++20 randomly spawns into existence, and a bunch of guys decide to use it in the company. The issue is, the compiler generates so much assembly, that your existing workflow cannot keep up with it. Your assembly git repo grows into hundreds of gigabytes, with PRs that are pretty much complete rewrites coming every single day and there's no way to review any of that shit.
What Anthropic is doing is redoing git from scratch so that it can handle all that assembly, while the correct thing to do is to commit C++ code into the repo, with deep trust that you'll never hit a bug in the compiler - basically impossible for initial versions of compilers, taken for granted nowadays.
What I'm saying is, Anthropic should create a versioning system for prompts, because they are the true "source code". Given the same prompt and the same sequence of random numbers, LLM will generate exactly the same code, which sounds awfully close to how compilers work. Once in a while put the generated code as a point of reference+ caching and presto.
The input to this is not just the preexisting code, the prompt you provide, and some random seeds. It’s also the output from every single tool invoked, which means you need to record the state of every single tool and every file that was read, every API that was called. It means that you can’t upgrade Claude. It means that you can’t upgrade the compiler. If you change anything in the state of the world you no longer have replicability.
Aside from all that, I don’t know why you would want this anyway. Storing a bunch of prompts doesn’t seem to actually gain anything even if it worked.
It seems to me like the AI labs are just pushing the envelope with blind faith that”something” will happen if they just get enough development speed. Nobody seems to have a coherent idea of what that something is.
I took a photo of a tree with chatgpt recently and asked it what species it was. That was kinda neat I guess. Someone forked a ps4 emulator with a bunch of Bloodborne specific improvements so its more playable on my setup. It's kind of okay for medical stuff.
All that busy work was for going from zero revenue to $50B in revenue in about 3 years, and releasing AI systems that are getting better and better at a ridiculous rate. AI isn't solving all the world's problems but you can't deny that they are extremely successful with this method of operating.
I definitely think that's an interesting question though. I know that in the physical product development world I'm seeing really odd asymmetric speed ups. Creating simulations is essentially automated at this point, stuff that would take days to code by hand can be done in an hour. Firmware debugging feels 3x faster than before. But the big slow stuff like manufacturing, assembly, and testing are completely unchanged. All of that little stuff probably adds up to maybe a 5% faster product development cycle than before if you're really leaning into AI. It's the type of thing that will compound over time especially if it's happening all over the economy, but won't blow your socks off.
"A world where starting is incredibly easy and finishing is more complicated than ever"
LLM's do allow you to oneshot huge starting bits of work in record short time. The frontier of the amount of work they can oneshot is clearly getting larger and larger. But I am still not convinced that they allow you to maintain existing work at a cost that is below a human being.
But, if the frontier of what you can oneshot continues to grow unbounded, then it really will not matter. We will eventually oneshot all software and maintenance will be a thing of the past.
... But that is a very big bet.
Yeah I wish this whole energy was towards optimization and improving hardware.
One thing that people are finding hard to believe is that the frontier labs are cultists who want to "create god". Hence the focus on improving intelligence so they can get to recursive AI, as well as the fear-mongering.
Aanthropic-openAI duo cannot go bankrupt soon enough. This industry is going to flourish with those two out of the picture. They're the pets.com of 1999 trying to have a say how the internet should be.
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
"Don't be snarky."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There's plenty of room for thoughtful criticism and skepticism in HN threads, including the present one, but please don't post like this.
Who decides what the "real problems" are?
Imo most of the economy and wealth creation is around activity that is not solving a "real problem", but who am I to say if someone else is willing to pay for it? Presumably, for said person, the problem is "real" enough.
You are a moral actor capable of rational thought. The very image of God themself, if you like. Don't shrug off your own agency.
Completely unnecessary. Secular humanism for me, thanks.