idk, over the past 2 weekends i have a repo for hacking on fujifilm camera firmware that's gone from zero to tens of gigabytes: i've got an emulator for older arm cpus like the one in the X70 (2016), a Hypervisor.framework VM for running their newest AArch64 software for X100VI (2024), a complete C re-implementation of the x70 source, many tools for injecting code and executing on live camera RAM over USB. the emulator has gone through 3 rewrites: first it was python and naive, then it was python with hot parts in rust with a more mature device interface, and now it's rust with some cold or experimental devices still python.

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.

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stephen_cagle an hour ago | parent [-]

Agreed, a buddy and I wrote a simple mod that shimed into Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader and were able to pull all of the art and description assets for that game by walking the object graph. Took about 4 hours total (including the site).

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!

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atlanticaccent 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

I'm curious, was there a specific reason you went with that solution for grabbing the games assets?

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?

	▲	stephen_cagle 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It was January I think and I don't remember our thought process. I think we mostly just remember looking at the fandom or whatever crap was there and thinking how out of date that stuff was. 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.