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A graphical desktop for the ZX Spectrum

131 points · 130 comments · graemep

  1. j4cobgarby · · focus · HN ↗
    It _does_ look really cool, genuinely, but calling it a "labour of love" and then having AI write the readme/docs seems conflicting.
    1. in_absentia · · focus · HN ↗
      Long-form comments in the code are AI-written too, so I assume the whole thing is vibecoded. I guess my question is why. This is obviously not a piece of software anyone will ever use. If the author didn't do this for themselves - to learn, to show off their skills - then why bring it to life?

      In business, there's this saying that "when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric". I guess LLMs also make that true for hobby projects that used to make up a good portion of HN. We'd celebrate a project like that not because it's useful, but because it's a triumph of human ingenuity and a celebration of a personal achievement for the author. But now, it isn't, so is it still something we ought to celebrate?

      1. walrus01 · · focus · HN ↗
        > I guess my question is why. This is obviously not a piece of software anyone will ever use.

        My best theory would be it's something that was built as like a novelty/proof of concept, that a current state of the art LLM can do tedious tasks like assembly on a ridiculously old/low resource platform and turn out something that actually looks coherent. I don't personally know a lot of people who enjoy building large things in assembly but LLMs aren't bothered by doing tedious tasks. Due to the tiny size of the thing it can probably very rapidly iterate on "this doesn't work, change a thing, run it again" thousands of times.

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