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What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI

135 points · 90 comments · keeda

  1. Kuyawa · · focus · HN ↗
    I ported Prince of Persia to Swift for MacOS [1] over the weekend using DeepSeek Harness, spent three hours in total, $3 in tokens, and got a playable and enjoyable game bringing back good ol' memories

    It is a faithful port of Jordan Mechner's 1989 original game and the guiding idea was just one sentence: port the game exactly, rewrite the engine completely

    I didn't write a single line of code or test, not even the readme. I don't know if it delivered swift, assembly or brainfvck as directed but the result is spectacular and I would never had done it in ten lifetimes

    Coding is solved, human programming is dead, apps will cost close to zero and those who don't see the writing on the wall are hopeless

    [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kuyawa&#x2F;prince" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kuyawa&#x2F;prince

    1. spider-mario · · focus · HN ↗
      (Are you aware of SDLPoP? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;NagyD&#x2F;SDLPoP" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;NagyD&#x2F;SDLPoP )
      1. Kuyawa · · focus · HN ↗
        Not me, AI was fully aware and used it as reference, the readme explains in detail how the original code, SDLPop and PrinceJS were used to build the fork and exactly in what measure
        1. spider-mario · · focus · HN ↗
          That raises the question of why do it anyway, and also diminishes the claim that it ported “the game” (either the abstract idea of it or the original closed-source implementation) and not those codebasese.
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