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ogig 6 hours ago

My most abandoned type of projects are video games. I have a folder with tens of abandoned projects, I re-frame them as experiments at that point. This last week I decided to give Claude a go at one of these, and it's been a blast, it picked up the general path immediately. Since I said to CC they were abandon projects, he explicitly pushed into "lets have V0 game play loop finished, then we can compound and have fun = not giving up". Its been awesome at game dev, I gave him game design ideas, he comes with working code. I gave him papers about procedural algos, and he comes with the implementation, brainstorm items, create graphic assets (he created a set of procedural 2d generators as external tools), he even helped me build the lore. These have been one of the most fun times using a computer in a long time. Claude Code + Godot = fun. Going back to it.

quietbritishjim 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think this is the first time I've seen someone refer to an LLM as "he" rather than "it". No judgement, but I definitely found it interesting (and disconcerting).

folkrav 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've heard it quite a bit before, but mostly from second-language speakers whose first language don't have impersonal third-person pronouns - e.g. French uses "il" or "elle" for all of "he", "she" or "it".

It doesn't help that the marketing leans heavily on anthropomorphizing LLMs either, IMHO.

yrds96 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not weird if it comes from ESL. At least in portuguese there's no "it" equivalent for pronouns or any other neutral artifact in the language, in other words, everything has a gender, even an AI model, the same goes for objects e.g.: knife(she), fork(he), spoon(she), plate(he).

People often commit mistakes regarding that, the same way we don't have "they" as pronoun to someone we don't know the gender, so we address to these people as "dele(dela)" (masculine and feminine pronouns).

But if this is coming from someone who has english as a primary language it's definetely weird to treat models as person

loloquwowndueo 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Weird. Don’t you have an equivalent to the Spanish “eso, esa”? Gendered object.

wat10000 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s funny with someone coming from Mandarin. There’s no separate he/she/it in spoken Mandarin, so they tend to mix up “he” and “she.” It sounds very strange and gives me some idea of what French speakers must go through when they hear me say “le voiture” or whatever.

saghm an hour ago | parent [-]

I took a few semesters of Dutch in college, and it has both gendered and neuter nouns for non-human objects. Interestingly though, the professor told us that in the northern parts of the Netherlands people don't really bother using the feminine ones ever and refer to every non-human gendered noun as masculine, which apparently also includes animals, meaning that a sizable portion of Dutch speakers will refer to cows using masculine language.

nothrabannosir 29 minutes ago | parent [-]

Because the article for masculine and feminine are the same (“de”) so absolutely nobody knows the gender of anything.

Source: am Dutch. Can’t wait for us to just ditch gendered nouns.

dsvf 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As a native German speaker, I have also referred to a chatbot in English as "he", and similar to you, a native English speaker, felt jarred by it. It was definitely not out of any personification or humanization though. In German, I would say it is "der Chatbot" (from "der Roboter"), which in German is a male noun so I would refer to it as "er" (the male pronoun) - which in my head I autotranslated to "he". Most of the time, though, I think of it (and refer to it) as an LLM, which is "das Sprachmodell" (neutrum), so I automatically translate it to "it".

So that's another, maybe more harmless reason for it.

golem14 15 minutes ago | parent [-]

I mean, both in English and in german, that's how you would talk to a dog. "Er hat in die Ecke gepinkelt"/"He peed in the corner" (or "she", if it's a female dog).

I don't know what is jarring talking about the chatbot like that.

It may be creepier if you said "she wrote that program for me" as you now assign a specific gender to the chatbot.

simondotau an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I recognise I am revealing a different type of ambient misogyny in my thinking, but choosing to gender an LLM as feminine gives me “I played tomb raider because I enjoy looking at women” vibes. Like somehow “she” is more of a conscious choice than “he” and comes with all the baggage of all cultural differences between genders, when neither choice should do that.

Curiously though I don’t get the same sensation when technologies are gendered by other people. I honestly don’t recall thinking about it when Apple released Siri. (Now I’m second-guessing myself and wondering if I should’ve reacted negatively towards feminine being the default for someone in a personal assistant role.)

slickytail 3 minutes ago | parent [-]

[dead]

torben-friis 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wouldn't read too much into it, it's natural for non native speakers. In Spanish for example, objects have grammatical gender as well, so it's easy to slip.

plombe 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well Claude was named after Shannon

mejutoco 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Reminds me of the main character of the show Mrs Davis. She insists on calling the ai it through the entire show.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14759574/

osener 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is common amongst French, Dutch etc speakers where saying "it said x" sounds unnatural.

Anonyneko 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Russian too. There is a subset of words which are referred to as "it", but for most words "he" or "she" are used regardless of whether these are living things or not. With loanwords we just decide by similarity to other words. Claude is definitely a "he" as the word is the same as a common male name.

This trips me up occasionally when I'm translating things into English. Once, when I referred to an indefinite gender player character in a gacha game as a "he" (because the word "player" is a "he"), quite a few people got mad! Even though in my head I was never trying to imply one way or the other.

Dou8Le 5 hours ago | parent [-]

For future reference, in this case you could use the singular "they" to refer to an ambiguously-gendered person or character. "<MC> drew their sword, for they would not tolerate such vile deeds."

moron4hire an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's an analyst at my job who calls it "he", who is a native English speaker himself, which I guess is because it's "Claude" (as in Claude Shannon) Code.

hansmayer 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean we have all met that one cretin who will discuss over chat by pasting bulletpoints from an LLM. No wonder some of them think it is a living person!

redsocksfan45 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

isjdkwjdown 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> No judgment

Yes judgment. Loads of it. Judge away.

This is just bizarre. Do not refer to this product of marketing-technology as you refer to a person. EVER.

hansmayer 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The article itself is also probably an attempt at marketing the LLMs too. They are now quite desperate. Expect to see a flood of such "independent" articles over the next 12 mo ths.

riddlemethat 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What’s fun for me these days is picking up a project I started with an LLM doing agent driven development a few months ago or even a year ago and hit a wall and stopped being able to be picked up by the latest version of Claude and/or codex and bringing it further. Some can now launch some still are too complex for the agent to build. But, it’s getting easier and easier to build personal apps. We are not far off from being able to say “Alexa, build me an app on my iPhone that lets me take pictures of the food in my fridge to compile the nutritional benefits and sync it with my workout app then compare it to the ideal ingredients I should eat based on my fitness goals in my health app and have it set to send me emails where it can find me better ingredients to buy that are cost effective, local, and meet my diet restrictions” and in 15 minutes that app suddenly exists.

avereveard 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Same I purposefully have a number of over ambitious project out of distribution entirely to test so failure mode, mostly games, when one works, well I gained a new game. Can't wait for my 10 player battleship game on a 100x100 grid to be functional.

maccard 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’d love to see your attempts at this. I think we’re close to something vaguely resembling this at a first glance but nothing that actually works.

arcatek 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't Godot a little ill-designed to work well with LLMs? for example I ended up a couple of times with incorrect tres files, and letting the llm generate IDs feel a little fragile.

operatingthetan 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have taken many stabs at it and Claude will produce stuff but the output is very far away from useful. E.g. "I've created a road and beautiful trees" and what I see is a mess of colors and shapes.

ogig 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I concur it's bad at directly visual concepts, your prompt is akin to the svg pelican. What I do is asking him for procedural algos, automatas, quadtrees, layered noises, and rig those into the game. Yes, it can't "make the next gta", but with a reasonable scope and knowing what it does best, it has been very easy for me to produce satisfying results.

operatingthetan 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My problem is I don't really have video game engineering experience. I was going off a concept that a different AI nailed with video creation and was trying to replicate it in the game engine.

cyclopeanutopia 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Would you care to show a few pictures?

ogig 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure! Two are gameplay pics. An enemy sprite sheet generation, and the results of the map generators. Of course these are basic placeholders for a few hours of work, but I will definitely go heavy on this route with more layering and details.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A7kfcjHjSmCNidqc9t731uoglzL... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Bl_n0ECqc78LGGf7SsOx38mRUOP... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JMcgzqcnZ2ncboeyAXvscRWagqR... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-luJ6y7YslNfwmFnCdIDbJ871i0... https://drive.google.com/file/d/14n4TLAVywk_1GMhLLGOuukQwUmb...

ogig 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I had very few issues, sometimes I had to direct CC to the godot docs and we could keep moving. Specifically the tile configuration was a "read the docs" moment. All the functionality is available through code, so nothing CC can't reach afaik. Is there any LLM oriented game engine?

kowbell 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Are any LLMs suited at directly modifying game scene/asset/prefabs for any engine?

jaggederest 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Bevy is a great engine for LLM-based games because it's 100% code. I'm toying with a few things in it, one of them is an entire-planet economic simulation, and it scales well up to a million dead tiles and 10k-50k live tiles on Apple Silicon, pretty impressive.

aleksiy123 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On the topic of procedural, one thing I experiment with is having the llm part of the procedural loop.

Sort of writing a narrative on top live.

Unfortunately, local models are still a bit slow and weak but was interesting to see what it came up with nonetheless.

hansmayer 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> he explicitly pushed into "lets have V0 game play loop finished,

> he even helped me build the lore. These have been one of the most fun times using a computer in a long time.

Such a warm, touching story about a friendship between a grown up man and his neural network. But at least I had a good, roaring laugh reading this nonsense, thank you for that!

ogig 4 hours ago | parent [-]

How snarky. You are conflating friendship with admiration for the effectiveness of newfound tool. If it's the "he" that triggers you, feel free to replace with "it". It's just a second-language artifact.

hansmayer 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I dunno man. He sounded like he found a new friend in 'him' to me. And it was genuinely hilarious. It took me a while to stop laughing.

noodletheworld 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> the effectiveness of newfound tool

…and yet, most people continue to say that non standard tooling ecosystems, where the agent cannot run and validate the code it writes, remain difficult and unproductive.

“I just pointed CC at godot and it made a game! This is sooo good”

…is a fairytale.

What tooling are you using to make it run and compile the code? How is it iterating on the project without breaking existing functionality?

None of these are insurmountable, but they require some careful setup.

Posts like this dont make me laugh; they just make me roll my eyes.

Either the OP has not done what they claim.

Or they have spent a lot more time and effort on it than they claim.

> I gave him game design ideas, he comes with working code. I gave him papers about procedural algos, and he comes with the implementation, brainstorm items, create graphic assets (he created a set of procedural 2d generators as external tools), he even helped me build the lore.

Such a sweet story about a boy and his AI.

Unfortunately, I also dont believe in fairytales.

Instead of waving your hands wildly about AI, post some videos and code of the results.

This is hackernews, not hypenews.

kowbell 39 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

OP never said Claude made a whole game from scratch though, nor are they saying Claude is doing everything without any human contributing to the project, nor are they saying they haven't spent a lot of time and effort on it. Just that it's made it fun and more accessible and it's gotten them excited about something they abandoned.

Here's a bullet point list of the things Claude's done according to OP:

* it picked up the general path immediately

* he explicitly pushed into "lets have V0 game play loop finished, then we can compound and have fun = not giving up".

* [I gave him game design ideas,] he comes with working code.

* [I gave him papers about procedural algos,] and he comes with the implementation

* brainstorm[ed] items

* create[d] graphic assets

* he created a set of procedural 2d generators as external tools

* he even helped me build the lore.

Every one of these are plausible in isolation.

ogig an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

But I had already answered, before your comment, with screenshots broadly showing the current state and the result of the generators.

You imply I'm merely "pointing CC at godot and it made a game"; I never said it was simple, required no previous knowledge, that it was instant or that the game was done. I do have a careful setup involving CI and isolation.

Godot provides a headless mode. CC runs python scripts to run tests and check for debugger warnings. For anything more complex it can wire debug info anywhere. Godot is fully code based so you can make the analogy with any other framework you used AI assistants with.

No sure about what you can't believe about my statements. CC implementing algo from a paper? That it can brainstorm item or lore ideas? I don't seem to be claiming anything out of the common usage of LLMs