Well, clarity would be achieved with a name like u64. Is num signed? What's the range? Is it integers or floating point? All these things are hidden. With u64 there would be no questions open. (Well a few maybe, like overflow behavior, but can't have it all..)
I did not read it because the prose was insipid. Maybe the project is interesting, but I won't know because I'm not going to read an infomercial. You must understand that this stuff is not to everyone's taste.
So if something is written by an LLM it makes it an infomercial?
Also, what are you comparing this post to? Because you should compare it to the author’s own writing and according to the author, his writing is not that good.
Move along then? Anecdotal datapoint but all the anti LLM comments in here are a lot of less than a year old accounts.
If you don’t like something simply move along. Constructive criticism is great but the volume of overly negative and honestly nasty replies like yours are not in the spirit of HN.
Good, I will continue to voice it. Unfortunately it takes me several thousand times longer to complain about AI slop polluting the bulletin than it does to populate the bulletin with AI slop, which is the actual nastiness going on here.
Nope the only nastiness is how critical mean you are in your replies. All it takes is a quick hey I appreciate the article but not the use of a LLM to write it. None of the other words you have used are in the spirit here. Move along.
Setting aside the style, I think you asked for more output — 5,000 words — than your prompt supports, so the model repeated the same details over and over to stretch out the story after it hits the major notes.
Obvious tells are repetitive numeric details: the number of lines of code (mentioned six times!), the number of pages in the manual, the ages of the developers, the age of the game, etc. The narrative itself also repeats, like the Steam rejection included verbatim twice, especially after the Prologue hit most of the beats in the first 400 words.
I did that on purpose, I thought it needed to be reiterated. See, you're blaming the AI but that was me. I did not specify a word count. Maybe I should have let the AI write the whole thing? Like I said I am not a great writer, especially content editing. Even with AI I couldn't make everyone happy. Oh well.
It has a particular style I’ve seen lately using more short confident sentences as professional writers do. But it lacks the professional writer’s sense of when to add an anecdote and when to leave out a detail. And it is this juxtaposition that gives it a distinctive LLM feel of being written in the style of a professional writer, yet something is off.
Please don't feel the need to be defensive about this. People are reacting in a predictable way to a shift in how effort is perceived.
Where one formerly could use a certain way of writing as a heuristic for effort put into content they are spending time ingesting, now that heuristic is meaningless and a new one must replace it.
At this point some people have decided 'has markers of AI writing' is the heuristic to match 'no/low effort' on, and are trying to use shame in order to start a system of self-policing against it. Unfortunately that isn't going to work, because
1. the heuristic is flawed
2. most people are going to end up using AI tools for writing, since writing well is difficult
I don't agree that it's flawed. There's so much to gain by writing your own words. It's something to practice and after a while, it's even fun to be able to express something the way you intended. Even today I do my own writeups and articles manually. I want the text to come from me, to show how I'd put it, even if I have a typo here and there. I feel like it's worth it to keep your own personality instead of having AI do it for you - or even edit for you. Even if you think your writing suck, it's still your voice and it's just more interesting for me to read an actual human being.
I agree honestly. I just wanted to get the story out and share it and I'm swamped IRL. But I'm going to go back and clean it up when I get the chance. I do appreciate the constructive feedback from everyone and I will do better.
It’d be an interesting exercise to just write it again yourself without referring to the LLM article then compare the two to see which bits of each are better. Yours would be shorter, but perhaps better and more honest?
Just wanted to say don't worry about it too much. I do advocate for writing because I like it and I feel it rewards me. But you made a decision to do it a certain way and that's fine. Don't let people tear you down for this.
I don't use AI for my writing and I agree with you. I meant that it is bad heuristic because people often do put a lot of effort into posts with AI writing styles in them, so it is not accurate due to a large amount of false positives. If one performs a test that is wrong a significant percentage of the time then it will be eventually abandoned.
The heuristic isn't going away because we have limited time. Let's say you can clock AI in the first paragraph.
There are lots of places like Linkedin where people write slop articles saying basically nothing insightful, and AI allows them to write at Isaac Asimov or Brandon Sanderson type speeds. AI slop has no cost, so it will always outweigh insightful AI-assisted writing without careful curation. You will have read thousands of articles that begin in AI-evident formats that don't end in anything good.
That will always poison the well of somebody at the end of that first paragraph. They will consider the source, think "What are the odds this is more slop", and often click out.
People who I know don't speak English natively get a pass from me because no amount of effort in the short term is going to substitute for fluency, but everybody else... less so.
I honestly get it. I wouldn't have made that comment but I get why it was made. It tells me I need to go back and put some more effort into it and clean it up. You know, in-between working 80 hours a week at the prompt factory and working on the actual game... Without Claude there would be no story to read. I pay Anthropic $200/mo and Claude is a robot. I don't think anyone shed a tear that I didn't put "coauthored by Claude" at the bottom.
It has nothing to do with missing "coauthored by Claude"
The problem is you're wasting other people's time, with long and low quality writing.
One of the points of writing your own words is to gather your own thoughts. The value of writing skills is to organize the delivery. But the first point is that they are your thoughts.
I think your replies are seriously missing the criticism.
Most people enjoyed it. It is the same as the game. Most people like the remaster direction, a subgroup vehemently dislike specific design decisions and they don't always overlap. The more people that learn about the game the volume of feedback goes up and so does the volume of negative feedback. Just telling you feel my perspective, take it when a grain of salt. So you learn to take negatively, especially emotionally charged negativity, with a grain of salt. And you have a compulsion to ignore it. But I'm a very self aware person and I try to see the other side. I may not understand it, I may not agree, but I try to listen and understand. But to say I blanket missing the criticism is a flippant remark in my opinion. I'm not an idiot... It's easy to tell AI was involved and it turned many people off. But they also crap on the stuff I wrote from scratch. So is it AI or just that I suck at writing? It was just to share the story. I reread it multiple times and I enjoy the story even knowing it like the back is my hand. I lived it. I write stuff for me. I remastered the game for me and to share with like minded people. Honestly, the article being anti-AI rage bait is a low pass filter for people who could have said anything, and instead, they chose to NIT the article. But I try to be open minded and do better, but I am only human, not an AI, I have emotions and opinions. I'm sure most of those opinions are flawed. But I'm not mad at any of the criticism and I appreciate it.
Writing is not about writing. Admittedly, that is a trick sentence [what does it mean??] and it exists because I'm trying to get you to re-evaluate my next words. And, I am doing this because I think you are missing the point.
Writing is about organizing your thoughts. You cannot have someone else organize your thoughts. Once you approach writing as a thought excercise, and not an output excercise, then there is a world of nuance and writing is more than just organizing your thoughts.
Further, you have allegedly spent 3 years on this. I know you're busy. That said, you can certainly spend 3 days on writing if you spent 3 years working on this.
Please don't double down on acting like everyone is just a hater. There is more depth to the criticism than I think is being acknowledged.
P.s, if you feel "blocked" writing and think of it as just about output, try this:
(0) Ask yourself what you want to convey, why; to whom.
(1) Write without inhibition
(2) Edit, cut, delete. Refer to (0); look at what seems higher word count in proportion to its value.
There are other tips to editing and writing. This is one rough off the cuff formula that I think tracks & may benefit you, especially since you seem to see yourself as a worse writer than you may actually be.
There's no reason to be so nasty. The fact that it's currently on the top 5 posts on HN means you're dead wrong, he's not wasting anyone's time.
TBH I found it one of the most interesting and engaging articles I've seen on HN in a long time. The writing itself is not great, but the story is great.
I’d love to read more about how the original code looks like - examples of the parts that would be so difficult to transpile / understand and so on. And perhaps an overview of the game’s architecture? It surely is a unique piece of code due to the complexity, and I’m sure there are many interesting parts and algorithms there.
Speaking of LLMs, I recently used Claude Code on my own old codebase to do such a writeup, and it ended up a very nice read for myself too - Claude managed to explain some parts of what I built better than I did :D
I don't, because I stopped reading after I recognized LLM output. You could basically take all the comments you wrote in this thread verbatim and it would still be better, even if there are some grammar errors here or there. Please give yourself more credit.
Can we stop with this? The world has changed, LLMs exist, people use them, and "omg LLMs" is a very tired trope now. If you didn't like the article, you can critique it, but "you used a tool I don't like" is just boring.
Why should I spend more time reading something than the person spent writing it? The fact is that generating large amounts of text without care or effort has become very easy, so it makes perfect sense to discard writing with LLM signatures.
> Why should I spend more time reading something than the person spent writing it?
The labor theory of value doesn't work in economics and it also doesn't work in literary criticism. You should spend time reading something if reading it is valuable. You shouldn't if it isn't.
The trouble is it's impossible to magically know in advance if something is worth reading. You have to use secondary information to guess. Until recently "it appears that the author put effort into writing it" was a vaguely useful signal, but LLMs have ruined that.
Actually that's not even the only issue. Another reason people hate this is because it's inconsiderate - it's like people who leave voicemails or say "hi" in chat. They are not respecting my time.
Until recently, the only way to know whether the author put effort into writing the piece was to read it. Simply continue doing what you've always been doing.
That's simply not true. Before AI it took effort to write. Even rambly nonsense takes some effort, and even then rambly nonsense is usually obvious without having to read much.
AI changes things so that you can produce text that seem like it was written with care and effort very easily automatically. It requires significantly more effort from the reader to figure out that it is worthless.
I personally find LLM text exceptionally boring and tiresome to read. It is often incredibly voluminous and filed with trite phrasing that turns a one sentence idea into 3 paragraphs of pablum.
Yes, this has been inspired by a senior management figure in my company posting a clearly LLM assited 500 word slack message that could have been 2 lines.
"I find this article exceptionally boring and tiresome to read" is fine. "This article was generated by an LLM, and therefore it will be boring and tiresome" is just bias.
I and many others find it a useful warning. So I doubt people will stop noting it as part of a critique of things.
'You used a tool I don't like' is really missing the point.
'You generated text that is long and a bit boring and will probably include falsehoods.' is a more accurate description of why people pick up on this - the style is an indicator of using a tool that generates convincing garbage.
What I want is for THIS to stop. "Listen, no one wants to hear about your moral issues, just stfu."
Don't give up so easily. Let the discomfort in and try & figure out why people keep saying "omg LLMs" until you can hear what they are actually saying.
Where was I giving that advice? Gold and silver mining stocks are extremely low compared to the price of gold and silver buying mining socks right now is buying low.
Skill. Knowledge. At your age, your biggest assert is your future earnings potential. The more employable you are, the better you will make iduring and after a downturn. In fact, the highest skill folks tend to even profit from hiccups in the economy.
Are the ones newer to the workforce just screwed or is there a way out? Kinda sucks that all this went down around 6-7 years into my tenure and it's just been a few years of scraping together freelance + portfolio projects to try and climb out of tbis rut.
(This might sadly be rhetorical given what I hear of '08, but perhaps there are new channels open to take advantage of. Or at least old channels to raise awareness of).
Yes. And here I am nearly 3 yesrs post last full time, 9 years of exexperience, and still looking (feel free to read my struggles in detail below).
What do you recommend applying to? I work in games so I guess I'm playing on hard mode (especially in these times), but the common wisdom of "normal software jobs love taking game programners in" hasn't rung true this time around.
----
Life story: Laid off mid 2023. I took a few months off when I got laid off, but the last quarter of 2023 wasn't kind to me.
2024 got me some freelance work, so I wasn't out on the streets, but it was a complete circus of an interview racket. Honestly worse than my first job hunt out of college. Its bad when you feel deep down there was someone better than you, but when you go 5 rounds in with good vibes to hear... Nothing back? That's truly disrespectful. And it sadly wasn't a one off.
Then in 2025 I hit some medical emergencies so I needed to urgently find anything. So I found part time work outside of tech and made due with that as I paid down those debts. That totaled up to a part time freelance gig, a part time job, and a few (failed) attempts at some hustles over 2025 only to end up making maybe a third of what I made back in 2022.
Now it's 2026 and I'll try again next month. My freelance work covers any gaps I would have had, I have a website almost ready with some personal projects to point to, and I'm overall more adjusted to the realities of this current market and will approach accordingly. I'm optimistic, but I know we're still in the thick of the weeds here. So I'll take any leads I can get.
None of that is true. Not one word of this applies anymore. Being highly skilled means you're highly paid, which puts you first in line for cuts. Talent doesn't get you hired, networks do. "Future earning potential" is just nonsense words, you can't eat "future earning potential".
This advice is from half a century ago. The times have moved on.
It was a "high tech domain", so institutional knowledge was required, problem or not.
We had domain specialists with decades of experience and knowledge, and we looked at our developers as the "glue" between domain knowledge and computation (modelling, planning and optimization software).
You can try to make this glue have little knowledge, or lots of knowledge. We chose the latter and it worked well for us.
But I was only in that one company, so I can't really tell.
How exactly? Do you tell the agent "please write a test for this" or do you also feed it some form of spec to describe what the tested thing is expected to do? And do these tests ever fail?
Asking because the first option essentially just sets the bugs in stone.
Wouldn't it make sense to do it the other way around? You write the test, let the AI generate the code? The test essentially represents the spec and if the AI produces sth which passes all your tests but is still not what you want, then you have a test hole.
I'm not saying my approach is correct, keep that in mind.
I care more about the code than the tests. Tests are verification of my work. And yes, there is a risk of AI "navigating around" bugs, but I found that a lot of the time AI will actually spot a bug and suggest a fix. I also review each line to look for improvements.
Edit: to answer your question, I will typically ask it to test a specific test case or few test cases. Very rarely will I ask it to "add tests everywhere". Yes, these tests frequently fail and the agent will fix on 2nd+ iteration after it runs the tests.
One more thing to add is that a lot of the time agent will add a "dummy" test. I don't really accept those for coverage's sake.
Why is that? Your (product) code has tests. Your test (code) doesn't. So I often find that I need to pay at least as much attention to my tests to ensure quality.
I think you are correct in your assessment. Both are important. If you're gonna have garbage code tests, you're gonna have garbage quality.
I find tests easier to write. Your function(s) may be hundred lines long, but the test is usually setup, run, assert.
I don't have much experience beyond writing unit/integration tests, but individual test cases seem to be simpler than the code they test (linear, no branches).
> Hopefully they're able to track down who did this.
Why? Was anybody harmed?
Hopefully they don't find out who did this. There was never any danger, and without this kind of joke, the world would be less fun.
(Obviously it should be harder to fool critical systems, so this served also as a warning, but if you want to attack such a system, a real bad guy would do this in more subtle ways.)
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