After catching my favorite minesweeper game uploading gigabytes of data to the cloud, I wanted to try writing my own.
I created a new folder, added a git submodule of raylib, and gave my agent these approximate two prompts:
Describe in a text file how you would implement a minesweeper game in raylib.
Implement the minesweeper game as described in the text file.
Out popped a beautiful minesweeper game, written in C++, with all the major features.
This isn't an isolated incident.
Previously I wanted to build a game for a friend. Over the course of two nights (~5 hours), I used grok imagine and grok build to write a multilevel platformer using ~3500 lines of C++. My friend was transformed into digital pixel art and inserted into the game, where she was faced with dozens of internal references only we could understand. Without AI this would have taken weeks, and I wouldn’t have even tried.
Despite measurably improving my life this is a huge tragedy; I liked coding for fun, but I don’t like practicing increasingly obsolete skills. I operate on the technology layer where things actually happen; I don’t practice writing assembly or creating punch cards since compilers will always perform better in the space I work. Ideas can be prototyped in a weekend, and sitting around thinking about struct padding is feeling anachronistic.
Even hobbies outside of coding are the target of exceptionally competent AI. In my personal time I’ve enjoyed writing short stories. Nobody reads them, but it’s a creative outlet that allows me to practice writing. After writing my first chapter, I asked AI to write the second chapter from a rough outline and it not only wrote it, but its chapter was more expressive and engaging than anything I could have done. I then had it write a third chapter. After that I abandoned the book.
Improving technology is a strictly good thing, and I don’t want to sound like a luddite opposed to transformer based models, but the landscape has shifted. If the cost of prototyping a project is almost zero, then people like myself need to find new ways to enjoy building tools.