The Ignorance Grows With Every Step
Today is the last day of my short holiday. End of August and Cornwall - the weather being what it always is in Cornwall at the end of August - but a few days of sun were given to us as a gift from nature. ;-)
As a bit of fun and an experiment - I spent the last 7 evenings on - trying to bring my old game from 2010 back to life. It was my small success, BACK THEN - if I remember rightly, around 100k downloads. And what’s still astonishing is that after all these years, the AppStore Connect stats still show - a few updates pulled down per week.
Anyway - I used the old code - Objective-C with my own engine in OpenGL ES + a bit of pure C. And I used Claude Code. The goal was one thing: recreate the game from years ago + build a simple Engine, pure Swift, but something that could be compiled to WASM. The final aim hasn’t been reached 100% - not yet - and what has been done.. I’m attaching on video…
And here one observation / digression. Let’s start with the emotions. Practically zero pleasure from the creative process, because I can’t call it a creative process. Maybe a bit of sentiment somewhere, old memories from 16 years ago - and that’s it… Yes, I know, I read sometimes - how people, trying to prop themselves up, pile an ideology on top of it, that it’s still creation, that it’s still creativity… Not for me! I never wanted to be a Project Manager, or any kind of manager - and working with AI feels rather like that - with an artistic creative process it hasn’t got much in common, sorry.
Looking for some analogy, this came to mind: if I need 30 minutes of energetic music, I can ask the machine to create a playlist with energetic music - but that doesn’t mean I created that playlist, and it certainly doesn’t mean I’m the author of that music. And that’s roughly what working with AI looks like.
So, fine, something came out of it. Over 9k lines of code were produced, and what’s more, some of it even works. I tried to look into the code, I even asked for documentation. Here and there I ordered some correction - along the lines of, shrink this here, fix the performance, because something - but as a rule these are high level suggestions, because I know f*** all about what’s inside anyway. 9k lines of code - there’s no way to get your head around what’s in there.
On top of all this, you can see that damned element of mental laziness, appearing all by itself. A hundred lines appear, then the next hundred - you don’t try to get your head around it, you don’t even try to analyse it, something doesn’t work - you ask the machine to solve the problem. The level of your own ignorance grows with every step. Bloody sad!!!
And on top of everything, one question keeps nagging at me - how much of this thing is really mine - honestly, I have my doubts. Maybe it still holds up somewhere, because back in 2010 it was my mad creation - but now… it’s certainly not mine. And prompting alone - sorry - that is not creation.. At least not for me - after all, I always had higher aspirations… and here I could actually feel my brain being deprived of real intellectual nourishment and running on idle…