This is pretty sad. Seeing this a couple of years ago would be mind blowing. An impressive technical feat by someone with grit and resilience to painstakingly build this from scratch.

Today? Meh.

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LarsDu88 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I had the exact same thought. I vibecoded a MOS6502 emulator a few months back in Rust. My Rust skill is weak, and I learned absolutely nothing about the 6502 or CPU design. Had I done it manually, there's also no way to prove I created it without LLM help making the whole exercise less appealing overall.

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socializer 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> there's also no way to prove I created it without LLM help

You don't need to prove it, that was never a requirement. You can simply say it. The only complication is that there's a fair number of people who, for some reason, really want to pass LLM output as their own. They are present on HN too. But here's another ancient trick to overcome that: reputation. Either the reputation you already have, or reputation you build over time. If you have a reputation as an honest person with genuine interest in software, you really don't have to worry, and you will have audience for your work.

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Retr0id 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm very grateful I have public pre-LLM projects I can point at (including a 6502 emulator!), and I have absolutely no idea how I'd go about bootstrapping the same kind of reputation starting from scratch.

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LarsDu88 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Unfortunately few of us have such reputation to truck with. I think the reality is there is no point in showing off manually coded work any more. All that stuff is really left for self-edification, and increasingly so as AI becomes more capable.

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socializer 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> I think the reality is there is no point in showing off manually coded work any more

What was the point before? To have fun, build a community, and to get attention of hiring managers. The first two reasons are still there. The third is more questionable, but there's still plenty of companies that hire based on what you know, not how well you prompt.

	▲	raddan 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Agreed. In the pre-LLM days, students always asked me how to "maximize" their hirability. The standard response was "have a passion project" and yeah, that did help people get hired in some ways. But the project was almost never the point of the demonstration. It was more to show that you are _the kind of person_ who sweats the details, who likes taking deep dives. For many of the best jobs, that's _still_ what they want; it's just now, a Github repository is no longer sufficient. That should not stop a passionate person from pursuing their passions.
	▲	jacquesm 17 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The hiring manager is more than likely to toss your output to another AI which will then decide if you warrant extra attention or not.

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morpheos137 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

LLM output should be credited to whoever prompted it. I don't get this hysteria. Llms are tools like compilers or chain saws. We don't say a cabinet made from milled wood is some how less authentic than a cabinet made with flint tools. We don't deny people who write compiled programs in a high level language without understanding every branch of the AST and every transistor setting authorship of their programs. Just because something is somewhat non deterministic and draws from the wealth of previously curated human knowledge does not make it an independent agent and not a tool. The people who find AI generated work 'sad' are implicitly sad about the democratization of knowledge and the lowering of barriers to entry to producing things. The thing produced is still a human product. Rather than saying it is an ai creation we can say it was author prompted and compiled of the combination of the author's intent and the store of human knowledge and reasoning trained into an LLM. What is there to be sad about a new tool existing to make things?

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socializer 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Thanks for making my point for me, although probably not in the way you intended.

The credit for the Doordash meal should be given to the person placing the order. If it weren't for their amazing prompting^Wclicking skills, which make food materialize out of thin air, we would not be eating today.

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jbjbjbjb 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It more like you texted a carpenter to make you a wardrobe.

	▲	IcyWindows 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The issue is we don't know if they texted the carpenter or had a detailed design discussion followed by detailed follow up and tweaks. People often assume one extreme or the other, but in my opinion, this is where these disagreements stem.

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dmitrygr 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Had I done it manually, there's also no way to prove I created it without LLM help

Of course there is -- ask you about it.

The coolest interview process i ever participated in (at MIT Lincoln Lab) was structured this way, and seems 100% LLM-proof. The interview was: give a talk about a cool/impressive technical thing you did for an hour and then answer questions from the interviewers about it for an hour. No way to succeed there without actually understanding.

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jubilanti 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

stream it live on twitch or wherever, build a community there

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noosphr 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've build a similar project in university in two weeks with lisp, spending 30 minutes before bed on it. The difference being that it started with analogue voltages in the transistors.

I'm starting to think people impressed by LLMs are for the first time in their life not using a hammer on fastening screws and deeply impressed by tools that font fight them every step of the way.

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Retr0id 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yup. I got excited for a bit, until I loaded the page and saw it was slop. I still would be impressed if someone actually took the time to learn about and implement it for themselves.

	▲	HarHarVeryFunny 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, and it seems they didn't even physically build it (which is most of the point of these retro projects), else where are the photos? So this is an emulation of a vibe coded processor. Couldn't they at least have added a three.js animation of bits flying around or something?!

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IshKebab 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe ideas aren't so cheap anymore...