There's just no way in hell ChatGPT at its current level is going to guide you flawlessly through all of that if you start with a simple "I want to build a raytracer" prompt!

Have you tried? Lately? I'd be amazed if the higher-end models didn't do just that. Ray-tracing projects and books on 3D graphics in general are both very well-represented in any large training set.

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snickerbockers 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Isn't the whole point to learn and challenge yourself? If you just wanted to render a 3-dimensional scene there are already hundreds of open source raytracers on github.

Asking chatgpt to "guide" you through the process is a strange middle-ground between making your own project and using somebody else's in which nothing new is created and nothing new is learned.

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CamperBob2 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Ridiculous. If you go through this process with ChatGPT and don't learn anything, that's all on you.

Given the lack of a CS professor looking over your shoulder, what's more powerful than a textbook that you can hold a conversation with?

	▲	snickerbockers 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>If you go through this process with ChatGPT and don't learn anything, that's all on you. I actually agree with this although I don't think I'm interpreting it the way you intended. >Given the lack of a CS professor looking over your shoulder That's definitely not how school projects work. The professor answers questions (sometimes) and he ruins your GPA when you get things wrong. He does not guide you throughout everything you do as he "looks over your shoulder".
	▲	Egor3f 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		A textbook that you can NOT hold a conversation with and must investigate all problems by yourself, this is the way I've learned programming when books were made of paper and compilers were distributed with CDs.
	▲	dudewtfman 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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astrange 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Claude is a better explainer, but yes they're all capable of teaching you to write a raytracer.

It has nothing to do with "raytracers are well-represented in the training set" though. I find it so strange when people get overly specific in an attempt to sound savvy. You should be able to easily think of like five other ways it could work.

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retsibsi 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> It has nothing to do with "raytracers are well-represented in the training set" though. I find it so strange when people get overly specific in an attempt to sound savvy. You should be able to easily think of like five other ways it could work.

Can you elaborate? Your first sentence seems to be saying that it's basically irrelevant whether they have been trained on text and code related to raytracing, and I have no idea why that would be true.

	▲	astrange 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I didn't say "text and code related to raytracing" though. I (and the parent post) said "raytracers". It's more important whether it knows basic concepts about computer graphics, linear algebra, etc. Reading the code of a raytracer is not that helpful because it's hard to extract general concepts from low level code like that. Besides that, it has web search and research tools. I just fed Claude Opus 4.5 the source of a raytracer I wrote actually, and it had reasonably good comments on it, but it knew less than I know and its updated version had a few more bugs and was missing non-obvious optimizations I'd added. (In particular it loves writing FP math as all doubles for no reason.)