Comment by Voltage
5 days ago
I'm on the side of AI is a huge productivity booster (by my guess... 10x)
But I don't want to make the claim lightly, so I did an experiment.
I signed up for copilot pro, and have been using their 'edit' feature. This is more than just their auto complete.
I set myself a goal to create a playable web game of classic frogger.
It took 4 hours with copilot "edit" and my full attention.
I didn't write a single line of code, but I did ask it to refactor and gave it a project description.
I suspect this would have taken me 4 days full time to get to this level.
Try it out:
So less than 10x already.
Question, how familiar are you with the used technologies? My experience on where Ai have been useful so far is things I don't have a good understanding on but, when I do, its a different ball game, mostly because coding it directly seems faster since I know exactly the behaviour I am looking for and I am not having to deal with unintended consequences.
I see it as the Alice cat thing, when you don't know where you going, any road will take you there. So its been great for exploratory work and prototyping.
Yeah, I'm very familiar with the tech, I've been interested in games dev and web dev for a few decades now. So you could be right, that the models aren't ready to "play on their own" yet.
I tried doing a warcraft 1 clone, but that felt too complex for the model being used (openai 4.1). That model was just the default setting in copilot.
I dug a little deeper this morning, and it turns out I hadn't actually enabled my copilot 'pro' mode, which has granted access to some more current or dev focused models. So I'll take them for a spin to see what they're capable of.
My goal here is to roughly get a sense for when a task is too complex for an "agent" to handle.
I also want to try adding custom tools to suit certain project needs. For example, Unreal Engine has a python editor interface, so I'd like to have an agent drive the editor to build something. I have my doubts.
Once I have a feeling for what level of complexity can be handled, I'll see if I can manage the tools better using this understanding, by breaking large and complex projects into appropriate chunks of work / complexity.
/endBrainDump
* It's not mobile friendly, and you use arrow keys to move around
> a playable web game of classic frogger
You could create a Tetris in even less time. Try to create something more novel and less hot on the heatmap of paths walked in gamedev.
I will. I'm just trying to evaluate the tools on a medium size task. I'm trying copilot's agent mode with the goal of creating a warcraft 1 clone. Or something resembling it.