Just curious, about how long did this project take you? I don't see that mentioned in the article.

We had our third kid in late November, and I worked sporadically on it over the following two months of paternity leave and holiday... If I had to bet, I'd say I put in well over 200 hours of work on it, the majority of that being manual auditing/driving of the generation process. If any AI model were reliable at checking the generated pixels, I could have automated this process, but they simply aren't there yet, so I had to do a lot more manual work than I'd anticipated.

All told I probably put in less than 20 hours of actual software engineering work, though, which consisted entirely of writing specs and iterating with various coding agents.

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mrandish 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> If any AI model were reliable at checking the generated pixels, I could have automated this process, but they simply aren't there yet, so I had to do a lot more manual work than I'd anticipated.

Since the output is so cool and generally interesting, there might be an opportunity for those forking this to do other cities to deploy a web app to crowd source identifying broken tiles and maybe classifying the error or even providing manual hinting for the next run. It takes a village to make a (sim) city! :-)

	▲	cannoneyed 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah I'll get the code out there soon - it's just very vibe-y right now, the repo is a bit of a mess since I never bothered to organize things. The secret sauce is really in the fine-tuning, can definitely get those datasets/models public on oxen.ai too