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By hand or with AI? Fascinating. So much work! What was your motivation for this?





90% by hand, 10% AI. I do this for fun and to learn about jvm.

I think that sort of ratio is the sweet spot for learning. I've been writing an 8086 simulator in C++ and using an LLM for answering specific technical questions I come up with has drastically sped up my progress without it actually doing the work for me.

Wow, impressive. A project of the scale and depth.

Irrelevant to me. People would never ask whether someone has created something looking at SO or not. If the thing works as advertised, good for them!

To some people the process leading to a finished project is the most interesting thing about posts like these.

LLMs can explain the process, and you can build projects with LLMs explaining the process.

LLMs can attempt to explain the code, but it can't explain people's thought process and that's the interesting part.

I want to hear about the reverse engineering, how you thought the code through. LLMs are boring.


They can, if you write down your thought process, which is probably what you should do when you are using an LLM to create a product, but what do I know.

> They can, if you write down your thought process

Just write a blogpost at that point.


You do not have to be as accurate or that specific, you do not have to worry about the way you word or organize things, the LLM can figure it out, as opposed to a blog post.

So "To some people the process leading to a finished project is the most interesting thing about posts like these." is bullshit, that is said by someone who has never used LLM properly. You can achieve it with LLMs. You definitely can, I know, I did, accurately (I double checked).

I will throw it out here, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163063 (My AI skeptic friends are all nuts)


That is not true

How come? You had different experiences? Which LLMs, what prompts? Give me all the details that supports your claim that it is not true. My experiences completely differ from yours, so the way I use it, it is very much true.

That said, it is probably pointless to argue with full-blown AI-skeptics.

People had lots of great and productive-enhancing experiences with LLMs, you did not, great, that does not reflect the tool, it reflects your way of using the tool.

I will just throw it out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163063 (My AI skeptic friends are all nuts)


It's not about explaining the process but experiencing it.

Well, they can experience it if they wish to. Sadly most vibe-coders do not.

LLM output is simply not interesting

I did not say that you should copy paste its output verbatim. I thought this was obvious.

Additionally, "interesting" is highly subjective. It could be technically correct, yet uninteresting.


A great question to ask. We're in the middle of learning where AI can and can't be effective. Knowing where and how it's being used is quite useful.



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