Comment by davesque
8 hours ago
Unfortunately, I'm a bit concerned that cool labor of love hacker projects like this will become much less common now that Anthropic (and possibly soon others) is moving to restrict this kind of usage. Oh well, so much for cool fun stuff.
Recently I did something similar (or even more labor-intensive). I recreated an existing game from scratch by manually rewriting its code without even thinking about LLM/"AI" tools usage. (see my submissions).
But I agree, that using an "AI" tool may be a serious temptation and thus way less new porting projects will be done with such care.
It's not really that cool to get a bot to do this work for you, anybody can ask for that assuming they have the tokens to burn.
I could write a well crafted reply, with a convincing argument, but why bother? You're just trolling. The whole anti AI coding thing is such a meme. I suppose you'd like to spend all the time it would take to reverse engineer a classic NES game by hand? Go familiarize yourself with 6502 assembly and everything else you'd need to know?
I would rather read a write up of someone doing just that. This exact thing has been done many times now and no one is really learning or demonstrating anything new. It is cool, insofar as AI tools are capable of reverse-engineering, mechanical translation, and automatic verification, but it is no longer _novel_ and borders on spam.
Yes, that is exactly the fun, not contracting someone else to do it.
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“It’s not really that cool” they said on hacker news.
Long standing account freaks out about latest GenAI/green account making vapid statement? Where are you going here?
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A silver lining is that porting games will serve as a catalyst to help the self-hosted LLM ecosystem grow.
The first project like this (of using AI to port old software from assembly) was interesting and novel. But every subsequent post has me wondering what new insight or lessons we have learned and if doing more of these is worth the energy burn.
Local models will never be restricted, and I suspect the Chinese ones wouldn't try to do so either.
> Anthropic is moving to restrict this kind of usage
I hadn’t heard about that - any details?
A short search away Anthropic takes steps to block Claude from reverse-engineering video games (106 points, 71 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320255