[sarchertech]

Yeah I vibe coded an addition game for my 4 year old that lets him do addition problems where the answer is always 10 or less. It’s very “juicy”. There’s a lot of screen shake and spinning and flashy rainbow insanity going on. If I had done all that stuff myself it would have take a week because I would have been picky about each little animation. The thing that saved me the most time was just being ok with the good enough animations the ai spit out.

It’s amazing for him and it works on his iPad.

However when I tried it on my iPhone it was a broken mess. Completely unusable (not because of screen size differences).

I tried getting Claude to fix it but it couldn’t do it without changing too much of the look and feel, so I dug into the code and it was thousands of lines of absolute madness. I know from using this at work that there are things I could have done. Write tests to lock in things I like etc…

But so much of the speed up was about not caring about the specifics that once I started caring about making an actual product, I was not much faster maybe not any faster at all. The bottleneck in writing a game was never in banging out code.

[zozbot234]

> I dug into the code and it was thousands of lines of absolute madness

Ask the AI to assess the code itself and to propose ways to gradually refactor it for better cleanliness. It can be good at that stuff, but you need to make it an explicit goal.

[sarchertech]

Yeah I tried that but without tests it couldn’t keep the look and feel the same. And spending time thinking deeply enough about it to understand and specify what exactly I don’t want it to change just goes back to my point that coding isn’t the hard part.

[Majromax]

Prompting all the way down? Have the AI create tests that document existing, known-good behaviours, then refactor while ensuring those tests pass.

[sarchertech]

That doesn’t work because tests for Luke and feel are difficult at best and nearly impossible when the code wasn’t designed for it. It’s a chicken and egg problem that you need to refactor to be able to test things reasonably.

It’s not an impossible problem to solve. I could probably setup a test harness that uses the existing game as an oracle that checks to see if the same sequence of inputs produces the same outputs. But by the time one done all, got it to clean up the code, and then diagnosed and fixed the issue, I doubt I would have saved very much time at all if any.

[gambiting]

"feed me even more coins and I'll make my code not suck the second time around, pinky promise" vibe.

[theGnuMe]

What language? JavaScript, Objective C, or Swift?

[sarchertech]

Typescript.