Maybe AI was involved, maybe it wasn't. I don't know. But the author seems to know what he's doing, rather than someone just giving Claude a task and posting the result to GitHub. He talks through some of the challenges in building this, some of the different implementations he tried, the kinds of bugs and crashes he hit, and ultimately what worked and what didn't.
This is exactly the kind of stuff I love. Another comment said Claude has killed interest in crazy projects, but for me, as someone who likes to hand-craft some "why would you even think of that?" projects from time to time, discovering his repositories and YouTube has made my day.
This was posted on hackaday[0] last week with a link to a youtube video. In the video, the author of the project goes into depth about some of the challenges they encountered and changes they made in good technical detail.
I think the complaints in this thread are not in the spirit of HN. Let's do better.
It's quite interesting, and describes how the developer used COBOL to implement a raycasting algorithm and generate a stream of PPM images to to pipe into FFplay. There's zero evidence of this being written in Claude; there are multiple clips of the developer working in VSCode, where the Claude plugin doesn't even appear to be installed.
It would be nice to have screenshots. Also it’s just a single commit, did you use AI? Quoting the readme: “FPS.cob is what you get when you decide that game development is too easy nowadays”.
As a few people have asked for screenshots, I spun it up. Here's a video of the basic gameplay: https://peterc.org/misc/fpscob.mp4 .. it's clunky, but it does play.
One of the things I like about it is he had to create a little front end to display the game, mirroring actual COBOL practice. Until the 80s or so, COBOL didn't support meaningful terminal I/O in its own right; it was all batch. If you were a mainframe dev and wanted to do terminal interaction, you either had to write your own routines for that in mainframe assembly or use something like CICS, IBM's application server which provided its own terminal handling and transactional database routines accessible through a language extension which got swizzled into regular COBOL by a preprocessor. Creating a layer outside of COBOL to do the things COBOL was deficient in, and using COBOL's regular I/O to communicate with it, is peak mainframe-era engineering.
Other solutions to the same problem existed; there was one called InterComm, which lacked the preprocessor and required you to reserve a shared area of memory and write messages to InterComm directly into it. These days there's KICKS, an open source library API-compatible with CICS, aimed at the sort of person who faffs about with old software on Hercules.
That just gave me flashbacks. I wrote code on some ancient stuff that operated like you describe InterComm. Haven't done that in years, and I don't think much of anyone uses those systems anymore (Harris H100).
We need to start putting guardrails on hn to not allow those esoteric projects to be published.
Before ai, it was impressive that a person has that much passion and dedication to go down the rabbit hole, and it usually comes back with some cool anacdotes that are nice to read.
Today, it's shallow, emptied out of the content.
It's not impressive that Claude wrote it, it was impressive if you have written it, OP.
> It's not impressive that Claude wrote it, it was impressive if you have written it, OP.
Do you have evidence that it's Claude written? Looking through the source it isn't clear to me, at all. Plus, even if it _was_ Claude/LLM assisted, why does that take away from the project?
It's like being offered a big mac at a fine dining restaurant. Yes, big mac is gonna taste fine, maybe you can dress it up nicely even. But the restaurant didn't make it, and you feel cheated for buying it (and in this case, wasting your time thinking someone coded it).
Something just existing isn't the same as something being made by someone with passion and effort beyond a one-shot prompt to Fable 5.
Because it is process that matters, in such projects, not the outcome. E.g. it is fascinating how one manages to port and run Doom on some microwave led screen... But nobody is going to play it eventually, it is not relevant as the "end product".
You have to remember that this forum is for people who have a passion and an intellectual interest in coding and development, and discussing such with like-minded people. Stimulating intellectual curiosity. An interest in what humans think and do is an implicit part of the experience.
An engineer vibe-coding a project generates an end product, yes, but what is there to be interested in or to discuss? Chances are said engineer isn't even capable of discussing the project in any depth. Are we going to be left discussing nothing but prompts and Claude workflows, and how we got the black box to do a thing? OK. Who cares? I guess we can all politely clap and move on.
I don't know if the posted project was written by an LLM or a human, but I have to agree with localhoster than AI has sucked a lot of the joy out of a lot of HN.
I don't think Claude wrote this, even so, it's still cool.
I'm not proficient in COBOL, although the README.md is very human generated, its not verbose at all.
I saw the recent "would a slop button be useful in addition to flags?" and my immediate response was "only if I can also flag people whining about slop.
Frankly at this point, it's just as insulting to claim it's shallow and worthless just because Claude did it.
If there is a cool project that comes out the other side, who cares? I am forced to use Claude for day job, and while it's annoying, I am running at a pace that can keep up with my brain, not just what I can shit out and get tested and inevitably miss things. Because you know what's great?
When you have actual controls in place like Jira ticket integration, CI/CD steps that can be considered, but the overall change is small, how many more of those small changes do you think I can get done in a day versus before it? But hey, localhoster says it's shallow and empty of content, so it must be true.
A passion project of mine has been to develop a full decompilation and a randomizer for Neutopia. I've been working on this multiple years. I had it at a point where I had chests randomized, item grants, etc, but that kind of turned into a lame game because of how the existing Neupotia game works.
It's been stuck at 40% for just as long. I pointed codex at it, and now I'm at the at least 85-90% and will have it done within a few weeks.
Given Neutopia is a much smaller target audience, but when this project is released, it will at least as capable as http://alttpr.com/en, and more capable in some ways as random dungeon and overworld layouts are already possible, not just reusing layouts and changing chests.
Codex generated a big chunk of it, so it's clearly a horrible idea and piece of crap not worthy of localhoster here.
Exactly. But the damage is done. I find nothing anyone does in tech impresses or interests me anymore. The only things that interest me are things I’d like to also do myself. I imagine it’s probably the same for a lot of other people.
Like OK someone vibecoded an FPS in COBOL or Pokémon emerald in a web browser with web assembly? Ok good for them, piss off karma farmer.
> Like OK someone vibecoded an FPS in COBOL or Pokémon emerald in a web browser with web assembly? Ok good for them, piss off karma farmer.
Sorry, but most of these discussions reek of extreme gatekeeping. First off, neither of these things are impossibly difficult and are easily doable with some dedication by hand. LLMs simply accelerate the process, the human still has to come up with the architecture, _idea_ and plan to do something like this.
I had to get into an old tcl program for work recently and had the same thought. I wouldn't necessarily pick it today but it was kind of nice in a way that's unfamiliar to me from modern development.
I remember being taught in my COBOL class (early 2000s, needed an elective, thought it would be fun) that that was the point.
The stupid engineers could write the code like the grunts they are, and then the manager could read it and verify that it was correct without having to know how a program.
That wasn’t exactly how it was put. And there are obviously some assumptions in they are on how good a job a manager who doesn’t know how to code could ever do.
The author has a number of repositories going back 3 years that seem purely experimental and, to me at least, really fun to look through.
https://github.com/icitry?tab=repositories
And he has a YouTube channel linked to his GitHub. Here's his video on the development of this project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o
Maybe AI was involved, maybe it wasn't. I don't know. But the author seems to know what he's doing, rather than someone just giving Claude a task and posting the result to GitHub. He talks through some of the challenges in building this, some of the different implementations he tried, the kinds of bugs and crashes he hit, and ultimately what worked and what didn't.
This is exactly the kind of stuff I love. Another comment said Claude has killed interest in crazy projects, but for me, as someone who likes to hand-craft some "why would you even think of that?" projects from time to time, discovering his repositories and YouTube has made my day.
Thanks for posting this, MBCook :)
This was posted on hackaday[0] last week with a link to a youtube video. In the video, the author of the project goes into depth about some of the challenges they encountered and changes they made in good technical detail.
I think the complaints in this thread are not in the spirit of HN. Let's do better.
0) https://hackaday.com/2026/06/06/a-raycast-fps-in-cobol/
Direct link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o
It's quite interesting, and describes how the developer used COBOL to implement a raycasting algorithm and generate a stream of PPM images to to pipe into FFplay. There's zero evidence of this being written in Claude; there are multiple clips of the developer working in VSCode, where the Claude plugin doesn't even appear to be installed.
It would be nice to have screenshots. Also it’s just a single commit, did you use AI? Quoting the readme: “FPS.cob is what you get when you decide that game development is too easy nowadays”.
Submitted a PR: https://github.com/icitry/FPS.cob/pull/6/changes. You can see a screenshot at the link.
It’s odd it’s not linked in the repo but the author made a your video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o
I have many projects with 0 commits, meaning were I to use git, it would be a single commit. It does not mean anything.
I hope for their sake that it's an agentic AI experiment.
Why the negativity?
If someone wants to have fun in COBOL, let them have fun in COBOL.
If it’s agentic fun, that’s cool. If it’s an interest in the language, that’s cool. It’s not like you have to have an ROI for a fun side project.
1 reply →
As a few people have asked for screenshots, I spun it up. Here's a video of the basic gameplay: https://peterc.org/misc/fpscob.mp4 .. it's clunky, but it does play.
I saw his YouTube video here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o
One of the things I like about it is he had to create a little front end to display the game, mirroring actual COBOL practice. Until the 80s or so, COBOL didn't support meaningful terminal I/O in its own right; it was all batch. If you were a mainframe dev and wanted to do terminal interaction, you either had to write your own routines for that in mainframe assembly or use something like CICS, IBM's application server which provided its own terminal handling and transactional database routines accessible through a language extension which got swizzled into regular COBOL by a preprocessor. Creating a layer outside of COBOL to do the things COBOL was deficient in, and using COBOL's regular I/O to communicate with it, is peak mainframe-era engineering.
Other solutions to the same problem existed; there was one called InterComm, which lacked the preprocessor and required you to reserve a shared area of memory and write messages to InterComm directly into it. These days there's KICKS, an open source library API-compatible with CICS, aimed at the sort of person who faffs about with old software on Hercules.
That just gave me flashbacks. I wrote code on some ancient stuff that operated like you describe InterComm. Haven't done that in years, and I don't think much of anyone uses those systems anymore (Harris H100).
I think Intercomm is bundled in the TK5 distribution of MVS 3.8 now. They got clearance from the owners a while back as I recall.
I'm assuming it's the same Intercomm you're talking about.
It is, and that's how I learned about it!
We need to start putting guardrails on hn to not allow those esoteric projects to be published. Before ai, it was impressive that a person has that much passion and dedication to go down the rabbit hole, and it usually comes back with some cool anacdotes that are nice to read.
Today, it's shallow, emptied out of the content.
It's not impressive that Claude wrote it, it was impressive if you have written it, OP.
The actual author of the project, has been putting out COBOL passion projects since before LLMs gained popularity. Because they write COBOL.
They've also written a couple dozen games in SQL over the years.
Accusing them of inexpertise with the tools is a gut reaction - but an unfair one in this case.
> It's not impressive that Claude wrote it, it was impressive if you have written it, OP.
Do you have evidence that it's Claude written? Looking through the source it isn't clear to me, at all. Plus, even if it _was_ Claude/LLM assisted, why does that take away from the project?
> why does that take away from the project?
It's like being offered a big mac at a fine dining restaurant. Yes, big mac is gonna taste fine, maybe you can dress it up nicely even. But the restaurant didn't make it, and you feel cheated for buying it (and in this case, wasting your time thinking someone coded it).
Something just existing isn't the same as something being made by someone with passion and effort beyond a one-shot prompt to Fable 5.
5 replies →
> why does that take away from the project?
Because it is process that matters, in such projects, not the outcome. E.g. it is fascinating how one manages to port and run Doom on some microwave led screen... But nobody is going to play it eventually, it is not relevant as the "end product".
You have to remember that this forum is for people who have a passion and an intellectual interest in coding and development, and discussing such with like-minded people. Stimulating intellectual curiosity. An interest in what humans think and do is an implicit part of the experience.
An engineer vibe-coding a project generates an end product, yes, but what is there to be interested in or to discuss? Chances are said engineer isn't even capable of discussing the project in any depth. Are we going to be left discussing nothing but prompts and Claude workflows, and how we got the black box to do a thing? OK. Who cares? I guess we can all politely clap and move on.
I don't know if the posted project was written by an LLM or a human, but I have to agree with localhoster than AI has sucked a lot of the joy out of a lot of HN.
5 replies →
I don't think Claude wrote this, even so, it's still cool. I'm not proficient in COBOL, although the README.md is very human generated, its not verbose at all.
The creator has a YouTube Channel you can check out: https://www.youtube.com/@icitry/videos
We need to start putting guardrails on hn to not allow those pointless comments complaining about usage of AI.
If you have nothing else to comment on then can you stop crying please?
I saw the recent "would a slop button be useful in addition to flags?" and my immediate response was "only if I can also flag people whining about slop.
Adds absolutely nothing to the discussion.
2 replies →
We need to start putting guardrails on hn to not allow those pointless comments complaining about usage of peepee poop
Could you stop evacuating your bladder and bowels? Puuuuhfleas
As OP: I _didn’t_ write it. I’m not the author. I just thought it was neat.
But thanks for the accusation.
speak for yourself
Frankly at this point, it's just as insulting to claim it's shallow and worthless just because Claude did it.
If there is a cool project that comes out the other side, who cares? I am forced to use Claude for day job, and while it's annoying, I am running at a pace that can keep up with my brain, not just what I can shit out and get tested and inevitably miss things. Because you know what's great?
When you have actual controls in place like Jira ticket integration, CI/CD steps that can be considered, but the overall change is small, how many more of those small changes do you think I can get done in a day versus before it? But hey, localhoster says it's shallow and empty of content, so it must be true.
A passion project of mine has been to develop a full decompilation and a randomizer for Neutopia. I've been working on this multiple years. I had it at a point where I had chests randomized, item grants, etc, but that kind of turned into a lame game because of how the existing Neupotia game works.
It's been stuck at 40% for just as long. I pointed codex at it, and now I'm at the at least 85-90% and will have it done within a few weeks.
Given Neutopia is a much smaller target audience, but when this project is released, it will at least as capable as http://alttpr.com/en, and more capable in some ways as random dungeon and overworld layouts are already possible, not just reusing layouts and changing chests.
Codex generated a big chunk of it, so it's clearly a horrible idea and piece of crap not worthy of localhoster here.
Exactly. But the damage is done. I find nothing anyone does in tech impresses or interests me anymore. The only things that interest me are things I’d like to also do myself. I imagine it’s probably the same for a lot of other people.
Like OK someone vibecoded an FPS in COBOL or Pokémon emerald in a web browser with web assembly? Ok good for them, piss off karma farmer.
> Like OK someone vibecoded an FPS in COBOL or Pokémon emerald in a web browser with web assembly? Ok good for them, piss off karma farmer.
Sorry, but most of these discussions reek of extreme gatekeeping. First off, neither of these things are impossibly difficult and are easily doable with some dedication by hand. LLMs simply accelerate the process, the human still has to come up with the architecture, _idea_ and plan to do something like this.
6 replies →
You know what, that is some pretty readable code.. COBOL might have been on to something there. I've gotten so used to syntax soup this is refreshing.
https://github.com/icitry/FPS.cob/blob/main/fps.cob
I had to get into an old tcl program for work recently and had the same thought. I wouldn't necessarily pick it today but it was kind of nice in a way that's unfamiliar to me from modern development.
The tcl syntax is fine. And modern tcl is fine.
But tcl 7.x and before was a pure string-based language. Everything was essentially a eval(). People would hit syntax errors on production code.
Fun, painful times.
The flip side: the interpreter is super simple and fun to write.
7 replies →
That readability is the upside of COBOL’s oft-assailed verbosity.
I remember being taught in my COBOL class (early 2000s, needed an elective, thought it would be fun) that that was the point.
The stupid engineers could write the code like the grunts they are, and then the manager could read it and verify that it was correct without having to know how a program.
That wasn’t exactly how it was put. And there are obviously some assumptions in they are on how good a job a manager who doesn’t know how to code could ever do.
Certainly an interesting idea though.
Looks like it outputs PPM and use ffplay as a display driver:
https://github.com/icitry/FPS.cob/blob/497867bb6827bcfc32d50...
They should compile it to WASM and host it.
I did not know COBOL compiles to WASM until I read your comment and looked it up, thanks!
The level of nested ifs is just pure insanity. Is this COBOL forcing this kind of style?
Doesn't run for me. Just I/O errors and quits.
Criminal not to put a screenshot in the readme.
Come on, we need screenshots!
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