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Copying Angry Birds with nothing but AI

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Disclaimer: I was a PM on Angry Birds.

This is such a great demo. The original used Box2D,LUA scripting, and of course you had to make enemies and levels.

There's obviously no expectation that you'd make a hit game from the tech in its current state. You're bound to be limited by the tech, rather than your own skills.

But for rapid ideas, for prototypes, for game jams, this is a game changer. I can also see it as a great alternative to Scratch for kids to play around with ideas. Hope to see more platforms try to turn this into an offering!

Nice, what's the craziest story about your time here

Would derail the thread pretty hard and I'm not sure even which one to pick. But my favorite memory was walking the streets of Seoul and getting in a little street market. There was this kid who was the son of the shop owner, playing on a cheap Android device. Super into the last update we shipped. You could tell he was gonna sit there on the floor in the corner and this would be his day. I was suddenly so self conscious about how we made levels and updates. Until then it was just the next update at the office, we had to make it good and polished and respectful of the player. But now it was this kid's world, much like Super Mario Bros had been to me. It was important. It was a really humbling moment.

It would be wonderful if such stories were more prevalent and lauded in the overall industry: at the ens of the day, it's not about specific tech but about how we end up affecting concrete lives. Human-computer interaction as a research field is all about this; seeing the others' perspective. Sadly it's seems to be largely seen as niche activity by the wider community.

I'd argue it's the most important goal of all consumer software. It needs to be respectful of the player. To do that you need to really, actually care about where they are in their lives and what you can do to meet them. We had an expression internally: "surprise and delight". On a more personal level I've always loved Gunpei Yokoi's "lateral thinking, with withered technology".

That might be a good approach for games and other apps with a certain level of redundancy and competition. But the other approach is having a vital product with high vendor lock-in factor, then eliminating the competition and consequentially forcing down the throats of customers whatever is promising more profit (browsers, "big" ERP, ...).

That's just so sad to read. Yes, I'm aware there are alternatives to respecting users. You use apps that dgaf every day. I'm saying it's important to care, not just for yourself and your career and market share, but because there's a human who's living their life and you can make it a but better with a bit of effort. Besides the lack of empathy and respect for humans in your answer, there is also just a sadness in giving up trying to aspire to do better and just do a bunch of cheap tricks to win.

Wow, I was certainly not embracing that other approach, just observing that it exists and that it is popular for corps in some areas of the industry.

Personally, I am highly user oriented, but there are constraints on what I can do for them, in my area.

I think many of us would love to hear more. Not looking for gossip or anything, just good stories about some technical hurdle you've overcome, or a special moment like this one you've just described.

Whats a good way to do this, an AMA?

That, or a tellHN text story with questions following ?

If you wrote your story as a blogpost and linked it as a submission, that'd probably be fine. It's how most posts here are structured.

Is there something specific to Angry Birds development that many of you find appealing?

It's one of the most successful projects of the early mobile games era. That makes me think it must be rich with fascinating stories.

Not "one of". It exceeded 2bn downloads.

I did a similar exercise recently when I needed to make a fairly basic rest API and CRUD frontend using 2 frameworks I wasn't particularly familiar with. I used GPT4 to generate ALL the code for it. I'll write a blog post about it soon, but a quick overview was:

I suspect it was slower than just writing the code/referencing the docs, and would be much slower than someone could do if they were experienced with the two frameworks. I had to be very specific and write a few long and detailed prompts for the more complex parts of a the application. It took around 5 hours to make the application, with a lot of that time spent sitting waiting for the (sometimes painfully slow) ChatGPT output. In a framework I'm more familiar with I think I could have easily got it done in under 2 hours

It was definitely useful for making sure I was doing it the correct way, kind of like have an expert on call for any questions. It was also very useful for generating perfectly formatted boilerplate code (some frameworks have CRUD generation built in, but this one did not).

It was a fun experiment, and I found it useful as a learning/guiding/generation tool, but I won't be using it for general day to day development any more than I currently do. For most instances it's quicker to just learn the framework well and write the code yourself.

> It was definitely useful for making sure I was doing it the correct way, kind of like have an expert on call for any questions.

I've found it to be shockingly good at this. I end up asking a lot of questions like, "what is the best directory structure for a project on {foo} platform?" or "What is the idiomatic way to do {x} in {language y}?" It has the advantage of having seen lots of projects in every language, and for some questions that automatically leads to a good answer.

I use Sourcegraph a lot for this when GPT can't get a satisfying answer.

I always get the classic “It really depends on your use case and neither pattern is exactly better than the other” when asking gpt about programming patterns

Put something in your system prompt along the lines of "don't waffle"

it has such a completionist fetish, I have found it works much better when you basically tell it to pick a side and not go out of its way to be balanced.

Even when it says that it always continues with "but" and gives me an answer.

this is how exactly how i use gpt4, i find it very useful

Be careful and don't trust all it says. Sometimes it invents API functions which are not there, or doesn't see existing. And always very confident till you point it.

And then it’s like, “thank you for telling me about this, I’ll remember that for next time,” which is how a human ought to respond but not how ChatGPT actually learns.

Hah, yeah that's so frustrating. It's memory is reset every time you start a new conversation, but it doesn't make that at all clear to people.

It also resets inside a single conversation if you go beyond a certain number of tokens, and as far as I know there is no warning whatsoever to the user when it happens.

The obvious next thing to try would be to continuously fine tune the model on these conversations, so it actually fulfills the promises most of these models make about "learning continuously". I haven't yet seen any actual implementations of this, though. I'm sure someone's tried it, I wonder how it went.

Which models make promises about "learning continuously"?

I’ve had statements along that line from Bing, dolphin2.1 and I think maybe Wizard Vicuna.

I'm finding that code is the area where hallucinations matter the least... because if it hallucinates an API function that doesn't exist, the mistake becomes apparent the moment you actually try to run it.

It's like having an automated fact checker! I wish I had the same thing for the other kinds of output it produces.

It will, however from time to time insert lines and variables that do nothing, but could result in bugs or confusion if not removed. I’ve encountered these hallucinations a few times. Overall, I agree with your sentiment, but I think it’s important to note that running isn’t always the indicator or correctness we think it to be.

You're still supposed to read it, like you hopefully wouldn't blindly paste a big code block from SO. A useless/unused line or variable doesn't seem that hard to spot?

Of course, but ease of detection can vary relative to the complexity of the code being returned. GPT-4, correctly prompted, can produce some pretty complicated stuff. But it also hallucinates in ways that are more subtle than one might think. The example I’m thinking of, it created an unused variable in a set of fairly complex ML training set up scripts that I mostly caught because I was familiar with all the proper inputs. But the unused variable was quite plausible if you were not familiar, new to the domain etc.

Compilers automatically detect unused variables. Unused variables are the last of your problems. You should be far, far more worried about all the misused variables.

Don't IDEs highlight variables that aren't read/written to?

In this case “unused” might mean declaring or initializing a variable and then assigning or reassigning a value to it later. In this case, it is technically used, so most linters won’t pick that up. But it actually does nothing so it’s wasted cycles.

No decent compiler would waste a cycle on that.

I've noticed some other funny things, maybe harmless but undesirable.

One example was really really hard to spot. Once I queried GPT 3.5 for a function to do X, and it did pretty well, when I looked closer though, it had wrapped 90% of the code in an unnecessary if statement. I looked at the code an thought something was off until I realized.

My point here is, if that was easy to spot, who knows what else people are missing because even in a simple case, unless you're actually trying to spot issues, you likely won't see them.

If it imagines a function it's fine. You can fix it in one prompt. But when it doesn't see it may move in the wrong way and produce limited solution. And you wouldn't know.

You would know in a similar way to a colleague of yours having done this code the previous day, or you joining a company with legacy code. It either has tests or you can't really trust it anyway regardless. You can ask the AI to also write tests for you, inspecting tests is usually much faster than understanding all the nuances of the code.

> because if it hallucinates an API function that doesn't exist

Yes, absolutely agree.

And also I’m no fanboy but when it does this and I only notice because the code doesn’t run, half the time I’m thinking to myself that the API function really should exist because it’s so logical!

I see it all the time. Even more annoying is when the API exists, but in a different class or with different parameters and outputs than you need, and the model would claim it does exactly what you need right until the time you try to use it and discover it can't work in your case.

Often I find that the hallucinations is how the API or lib should have been if it was more sane. Maybe someone could turn this into a virtual API critique.

>I had to be very specific and write a few long and detailed prompts for the more complex parts of a the application.

This is my experience. You still have to understand programming: you're just typing it out in Natural English.

Conversely, doing so has helped me flesh out my thoughts on many occasions. As I ran into obstacles with errors or imprecise prompting, I realized my design had issues or edge cases I hadn’t take into account. Perhaps it would be better if I wrote out several paragraphs describing my intentions before taking up most coding tasks, but I hardly think my boss would be in support of this!

Like a rubber duck which provides feedback. but since it's coming from a rubber duck it's good to verify that duck knows what it's talking about.

> Perhaps it would be better if I wrote out several paragraphs describing my intentions before taking up most coding tasks

I often do things like this, and if the scale of the document was somewhat larger than you describe, it would be a design document.

My role unfortunately doesn’t allow for this. I do more “in the trenches” data science stuff. The value is quite obvious to me for a role where there is more space for this or in product planning.

That's a great fit for scenarios where you do know programming but don't know the particular language and framework on which you suddenly have to do some maintenance or improvement.

For many things the available documentation is poor, and asking a bot is much more helpful.

Yes exactly. I had to be very specific and tackle the project in the same way I would if I was fully writing the code. First data schema, then models, then controllers with CRUD and views, then routes, then authentication, then test cases, then TS transpiling, etc...

It's definitely not something someone with zero coding experience could easily do, and I feel even a junior developer would struggle with anything even as complex as this. You have to have the concept and structure in your head, it's just writing the code for it.

> You have to have the concept and structure in your head, it's just writing the code for it.

I wonder how far you'd get with the technique of asking ChatGPT to lay out its plans first, kind of like the improvements in math questions you see when you ask it to write down its reasoning before committing to any answer.

"This is what I'm looking for: XXX. What are the different pieces of this that I'm going to need to create?"

"Ok, the first thing on your list you gave me was a database to store the data. What would the structure of that database look like?"

"Can you give me the code to create that database?"

Etc etc. i.e putting the actual code as the last step each time.

This is the best form of prompting for generating code. You tell it to first generate a technical spec for solving the stated problem problem, consider multiple options, return for your review. You then use a trigger command like “build” to then implement, once you’ve specified any changes.

I suspect it would work surprisingly well! But still, I think you would have to have a fairly good concept of coding to do even that. For example, my mum who has zero concept of what a database is (beyond the dictionary definition) would not be able to piece together an application like this (sorry mum!). But a junior developer would probably be able to just about do it depending on complexity.

For me, using GPT felt very slow, but for a junior it might actually be faster than trial/error and Googling. Also, ChatGPT is only going to get better and better, so we can expect it to become quicker and easier to do such things.

What I think you're overlooking is that most people can only do a few hours of hardcore coding at peak productivity a day (3hours for me, maybe)

So you could spend 3hours babysitting GPT4 to write some code for you, but then you'd still have 3 hours of peak code productivity that day that you haven't "used up" yet

I’m the opposite, personally. I can code for 5 or 6 hours just fine if I’m “in the zone”, but I can’t deal with LLMs for more than an hour or two max, usually less. I find their sweet spot is when I need to ask one or two questions with one or two follow-ups, 5-10 minutes ideally. They can sometimes be a big win in small doses if you can keep it to that kind of interaction. But they are just draining to interact with for longer periods. For me they’re a lot like being a TA stuck in multi-hour office hours with undergrads once you get past a few questions. Just a really shitty slog.

If it were me, babysitting GPT4 would still spend my peak code productivity credits, as it's basically coding (in natural language).

It’s thinking either way. I would even wager that the trivial code that GPT writes may be easier to read for me, than some convoluted, human language description of the same thing, done with numerous corrections at every point.

The relative uniformity of code is a positive for human understanding as well, e.g. a^2+b^2=c^2 is easier to parse/transmit the idea over any “spoken” version of the same thing.

True. Although I did find the writing of prompts to be quite exhausting due to tedium and waiting for the output to be frustrating, so that would dig into my energy for peak coding. I would say it uses less concentration, but about the same amount or even more effort. But also it was a very narrow test, maybe for certain things (especially repetitive code or boilerplate code) it could be very beneficial.

> I used GPT4

Do you use the ChatGPT Plus version or the API? If the API, what do you usually use to access it?

You should actually time how long it takes you to write it yourself rather than guess. The results may surprise you.

This is more interesting than the deluge of posts that say "I created an iOS app in 30 minutes using ChatGPT!" Which doesn't mean much because it could've done nothing more than create a simple hello world.

This one at least shows the finished product, which is indeed pretty impressive.

Some details I'd need to know are (a) how long did it take, (b) how many prompts, (c) how many course-corrections were required, and (d) how competent this individual was with the technologies in question.

I've personally found ChatGPT extremely empowering in lots of scenarios, but code generation was not among them.

I’ve been playing with ChatGPT code generation to make entire sites with flask, python, html+js+css, backed with SQLite db and it’s amazing. I’ve had it write like 5k lines that are all live in prod and working (not much traffic lol but still).

A huge huge factor is knowing the limitations and getting better at prompting. And identifying likely hallucinations and asking for risks etc.

I’ve found it best with tech I don’t know well (I’m an android dev using it to make websites, something I haven’t done myself in like 15 years).

Most of the coolest stuff for me is help with sysadmin and running the server. The ability to debug gunicorn errors is great.

I do have to modify the code it outputs as the project grows and it loses context, but honestly the context limits are the biggest hurdle for bigger projects and those will be lifted soon.

Edit: Most recent site I made with like 95% code from ChatGPT is https://cosmictrip.space/ which generates prompts with GPT-4 that are then used to generate space images with DALL-E.

It's a simple site but there is a secret adventure game I'm working on (GPT+Dall-E) that is open-ended image+text AI-driven game. I'm hoping to launch before Nov 6 with DALL-E 3 API (hopefully...!). The adventure game is also written like 95%+ by ChatGPT.

I've had such great success with it coding that I'm using the GPT-4 API with an agent I'm making (everyone is huh). I have function calling hooked up to generate structured subtasks that the agent can then write the code for, and support for files to include context, chat with your code, etc. It's not ready to show but the GPT-4 code generation abilities are really incredible - but you have to be experienced at prompting. Your first prompts aren't likely to be great, which is why I'm hoping my agent can have success. The idea of the agent I'm writing is a Jira/kanban style board where you have AI coders assigned to tasks that you can approve and modify etc. The tickets should automatically move across the columns as the AI checks the work etc.

+1 for its suitability in helping with systems administration.

One responsibility at my current job is administering a Windows server and trying to get it to do things that are easy on a Unix -- that should be easy anywhere -- but, on Windows, seem to inevitably degrade into nightmares. ChadGPT has given me huge amounts of blessed ammo to shoot at the nightmares, and there's no way I could do that portion of the job in a feasible time frame without it.

ChadGPT ?

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR2JJPxRRWvxy6naePMpsAQ

I feel that trapping your AI agents in a kanban board isn't going to do your survival chances a lot of good when the robot apocalypse inevitably comes for us meatbags.

Parents know what's better for they kids, they will understand

Is it at all possible for you (or someone reading who has done something similar) to share their chat?

Reading good prompting is probably one of the better ways of learning how to do it.

That is a great point and I will definitely share my prompting experience and some real prompts in a blog post this week. I'll come back here and link to it when ready.

How much of these 95% is boilerplate code?

Some for sure but all the algorithms (simple ones) and such is also done successfully by ChatGPT.

adventure game I'm working on (GPT+Dall-E) that is open-ended image+text AI-driven game. I'm hoping to launch before Nov 6 with DALL-E 3 API.

Some people have hooked AI dungeon / koboldAI up to stable diffusion to generate these kinds of procedural Ender's game style interactive graphical text adventures with varying degrees of success.

If your game is going to be similar, you'd better get in the habit of aggressively caching the generated imagery for it on S3 because no way the DALL-E 3 API is going to be cheap.

There was a Show HN a few months ago with something similar where a GPT agent would open up PRs with corresponding code against your GitHub repo.

You are right about the context window limitation. I exclusively use Azure OpenAI GPT-4 32k version and it's been a game changer when coding on complex projects.

https://twitter.com/javilopen/status/1719363669685916095 is relevant

> Although the game is just 600 lines of which I haven't written ANY, [coding the game] was the most challenging part

Not quite hello world, but not too much more difficult than a shopping list. The really impressive thing to me is you can make angry birds with just 600 loc (and a couple libraries)

My guess is that the main parts of the game are physics (collisions etc) and the scoring system, so that part wasn't too surprising to me.

I was pleasantly surprised at the visual quality, I knew Midjourney could produce quality graphics assets, but I guess I didn't realize how easy it was to pull into a game.

2D sprite Graphics are just files. Game engines are able to load files.

There are lots of open source Angry bird clones, so it's not quite as impressive as it seems.

Programming a new game without dozens of existing templates would be a better litmus test.

Sumplete would be a good example: https://sumplete.com/

That's not an entirely new game (though the other versions of it are pretty obscure), but super interesting https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/sumplete-chatgpt-ai-gam...

Not only are there tons of Angry Birds clones (Angry Birds itself is kind of a clone of earlier games), there are also tons of step-by-step tutorials for making them, which were no doubt included in the training data.

Honestly, it’s kind of difficult to believe.

GPT4 is great at this stuff, but iterative refinement doesn’t work in my experience.

As the conversation increases, the previous context is lost and the generated code deviates from its previous behaviour.

For example, “fix this bug…” can easily result in a solution that breaks some other thing. You can also see code generated in thread (1) that does exist in the final result (2), suggesting that (since this is the very top of the code), they were getting chatGPT to iteratively generate 600+ line segments.

I severely doubt this.

Creating a new Slingshot on line 20 after it is defined on line 500? That is extraordinarily unlikely unless you specifically prompted it to do that.

“loadImage('stone2.png');”, it just happened to pick the right file names? The right sprite sizes? You provided all that in a prompt and it wrote the code? Come onnnn… show us the actual prompt you used.

It seems much more likely they generated a set of class objects relatively independently, then manually assembled them into a larger file, copied the entire thing as input and then crafted a “code prompt” like “write a function that does such and such”.

It’s not impossible they used prompts like they claim (3), but I feel they are (for likes and cred) vastly overstating the “it did all the coding” part of this project.

I feel they probably hand wrote some of the code (or assembled it) and used it as input + a “now do this also” style prompt, so the output was “100% generated”, but not in the way people are assuming.

This approach tends to make GPT4 rewrite the existing code, but unless you specifically ask for (or add) comments describing the intent through out the code (missing in most of the generated code), it will drift from the previous functionality. With no test suite to verify, you won’t notice this subtle drift and things just break. There’s no mention of either of these things being done by the author.

Further more, this user has a vested interest (4) in selling training materials for AI, so it’s in their interest to appear to be an expert at this, and has provided (even when asked on X) no additional details, no “step by step” git repo with history, no actual prompts they’ve used.

Given the lack of details and the frankly unbelievable results, I think there’s fair call to be sceptical in this case.

You could generate this kind of thing from models such as codellama 34B, or GPT 3.5; but not using the method as described.

I’m… not convinced you could do it with gpt4. The prompts seem too stupid to be real (5)… but I happy to be proved wrong with more details. GPT4 is good.

[1] - https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FF9xoI8mXgAAn7v9.jpg [2] - https://bestaiprompts.art/angry-pumpkins/sketch.js [3] - https://nitter.net/javilopen/status/1719363669685916095#m [4] - https://javilopen.substack.com/ [5] - “Now, make the monsters circular, and be very careful: apply the same technique that already exists for the rectangular ones regarding scaling and collision area, and don't mess it up like before. ”

Context is 8k and it's quadratic. It "sees" everything in that window. If you want to have a long conversation try Claude or some of the 32k models. Claude uses a strange kind of attention that isn't always as precise but it's very good at finding key information in huge documents.

Key information is not relevant for generating code.

You have to generate specific api calls with specific semantics not “high level summary” and “key information” .

You have to generate token sequences that are functionally equivalent to an exact segment of the input prompt.

A lower precision is less useful for code generation.

How do you maintain existing code functionality when you give code + “refactor for x” as an input?

I’m skeptical you’ve tried this and know what you’re talking about.

You are welcome to be skeptical and I will happily continue to use these tools for drafting code and writing every day. I usually provide documentation for the systems I want to use on input. Then I include source code of anything I'm hacking on. If none exists I build it up using "let's do this step by step" where the first step is outlining or architecture and subsequent steps fill out components. The same pattern works for long form prose. Having 100k tokens is almost enough. It means the model can attend to a ton of relevant information.

Also, this works well when the system gives you patches. I wouldn't say "rewrite this entire thing to make this one change" because if it's anything non trivial it will shift. Again I see the same patterns for code and text. Ask for small changes, contained updates. Guide the model to work in small increments, using abstraction to deal with high level broad topics.

Seriously?

You wouldn’t use it refactor because the implementation will drift, but you’d use it to generate a patch to apply to the code?

Hm.

Well, I don’t think that style is relevant or practical for large scale code generation as shown even in this ~600 line example.

…but, I’d love to see the details of how it could done, end to end, by someone who has done something like that successfully and is willing to prove it by sharing the prompts and outputs.

It's very hard to ask one of these systems to copy an entire piece of text and then change one or two things in it. They will often make small errors. So it's easier to ask for patches and apply them manually to edit the code or text that's being worked on. Happy to talk more how do I find you?

It is extremely suspicious that every time someone gets an impressive "no-code" result from GPT like this, they never show the actual conversation.

In case you're interested, I shared the conversations I had when I used ChatGPT to build a small custom JavaScript tool here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations...

One other interesting question is “how does it work in all the other cases not shown in the video?”

After seeing my son rage-tapping a loading spinner I / GPT coded this game on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

https://spinner.franzai.com/

Think it could be an interesting UX pattern. Having interactive loading (spinner) games that at least give is feedback that our actions (even in between things) have impact.

It is an interesting approach to loading screens, and personally I would have expected way more games to use such a feature. Not AAAs, of course, but indie games.

I clearly recalled having read the news about the patent of this having expired a while ago, and from a quick search, a while ago, has been 8 years ago https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/loading-screen-game-pa...

I remember playing Galaga while Tekken loaded on the PS1.

Willy Beamish for the Sega CD had something similar, too. It was a godsend because that game's scenes took forever to load...I've only been able to revisit it thanks to flash carts that mostly eliminate the loading speed.

For what is worth, my partner and I just had a good laugh playing this with four hands and pushing it over 25. Really fun fidget, thanks for sharing!

I got it to level 7

Could only get to level 6 on PC. On mobile with 8 fingers tapping got to level 37 pretty easily.

got to 9 with two finger left clicks

Finger tapping test: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-37068-023

Fun fact: there's a patent on loading mini games that has prevented such developments. I think it's owned by Namco, you can see it in Ridge Racer

Reminds me of watching the Saibamen grow while spamming the analog sticks on the loading screen in Budokai 3 (PS2).

That AI is transformative for development is not in doubt any more. Just this past week, I've been able to build two medium sized services (a couple of thousand lines of code in python, a language I hadn't used for more than a decade!). What's truly impressive is that for the large part, it's better than the code I'd have written anyway. Want a nice README.md? Just provide the source code that contains routes/cli args/whatever, and it'll generate it for you. Want tests? Sure. Developers have never had it so easy.

One thing to note is that for code generation, GPT4 runs circles around GPT3.5. GPT35 is alright at copying if you provide very tight examples, but GPT4 kinda "thinks".

Another piece of information from experience - GPT4 32k contexts fail quite often. So if you're generating let's say 10k tokens or more (around 30k characters), you'd have to give it a few tries. Another, ChatGPT is not the ideal interface for non-trivial work. You should use the API directly, or use something like Azure OpenAI Chat Playground which lets you use 32k contexts.

Shameless plug: I have this open source app which automates grunt work in prompt generation - https://github.com/codespin-ai/codespin-cli

I find it interesting that over the past decade so much investment has gone into making no code tools, and now ChatGPT is so good at writing code that it’s probably faster, more flexible and approaching the same level of usability for technically minded but non coding type folks.

I recently had to create a demo app to consume and publish a REST service using Mendix and it took a couple of days to figure out all the details, but doing the same thing in any language (bash for example) using ChatGPT would have taken minutes.

Deployment and version control can be solved without much technical prowess using PaaS/IaaS, especially if you’re comparing your costs with enterprise no code platforms.

It may be my personal bias talking (I’ve always disliked no code platforms because they feel more cumbersome when you have to do anything serious, I dislike ActiveRecord ORMs for similar reasons) but it kind of seems like No Code will be obsolete pretty soon.

Who wants to drag and drop when you can just ask, copy and paste?

Would it have taken minutes? Can you try and give us real, rather than speculative, feedback? Shouldn’t take much time!

Sure here you go:

https://chat.openai.com/share/f98d04b9-6d93-46b7-9fa9-7c9ec1...

I think this solution is about the perfect thing I can come up with, conceptually. Nocode is easy but rigid. Coding is flexible but tedious and error prone.

Being able to talk out what you want to quickly get the code, as long as it's clean, gives you the flexibility to then tune as needed. And in some cases, like apparently this one, that wasn't even necessary. Exciting times ahead...

I guess the thing that's still lacking from an AI code solution is security guard rails. My demo below for example is open to injection attacks but I think that could be solved with fine tuning or custom instructions.

You can't just have amateurs copying and pasting stuff into production environments, but even the task of writing tests can be given to an AI. Like you get one AI to write some code, then you get another AI to write code to test it. The chances of perfectl complementary errors are pretty low, but even if that happens you then get an AI to write a frontend script to run automated integration tests, and then have some human quality control at the end.

Really, I think a code-based AI pipeline has much more long term potential than no code does. The interfaces are just so laborious.

This statistical plagiarism laundering is pretty neat.

IMHO, stopping the laundering gold rush is a more urgent priority for law, than creating market moats for the current big pickaxe vendors and pretending it's about preventing HAL.

There have got to be some freelancers/remote workers who have 100x'ed their productivity using GPT-4 and AI tools correctly. I can't imagine all these cool hacks exist in a vacuum. Imagine what we'll have in 2 years. The genie is out of the bottle.

100x? Well they probably weren't very productive in the first place then. If you know tips to use chatgpt and "100x" your productivity, please share.

Every time I see these articles I get more and more worried about my employability to be frank... with no backup plan and way too much time poured into learning software engineering. It's not looking good gang.

I'm genuinely not worried about that. As others have observed, us programmers will be in trouble when regular people learn to produce a product spec that's detailed enough that an LLM can create the working software that they need.

That sounds a lot like programming to me!

I expect our work will change: we'll be able to spend more time thinking about what we are building and less time typing code on our keyboards. But if anything, we're going to become more valuable - because we'll be able to get a whole lot more done.

That's fair and I hope that is the case. That might even be fun, and I mean I actually have a lot of fun with gpt-4 now. My bigger complaint there then is that you need more money to be competitive in this industry now? Until LLMs become smaller more efficient? Like back in university the best student was a Russian immigrant who learned back in Moscow on pen and paper, no compiler to mostly handhold.

Yes it's like weavers and looms.

It depends if the 'skill' of programming/creating shifts more to the LLMs vs programmers. If so market capitalism will see programming commodified.

If not, and LLMs just add leverage to what programmers/creatives do, it'll move more towards a sports/entertainment model (winner takes all, or most), with probably far fewer professional participants.

The workflow has shifted a step up:

1. Define problem

2. Generate specifications <-

3. Write the code

Knowing how to do step 3 will get less and less important everyday.

I think most utility software projects won't even require this three step process. More like "define problem, use an AI-assisted interface to whip up a few solutions, spit shine your favorite, if necessary."

LLMs seem very well-suited to generating written specifications, like they do with writing the code itself. They can even help with the "define problem" part.

Steps 1 and 2 are more reliant on human-to-human communication if you are developing an application to be used by some end user and not something that just ingests data and processes it. It takes skill to translate non-technical speak into a clear goal and specifications required to achieve that goal, to probe the third party and ask specific questions to tease out their expectations of the application. That, LLMs can't do yet. I have no doubt that they'll get better at that in the near future though.

Ah, requirements capture.. yeah, not straight ChatGPT but "having a directed conversation" doesn't seem like a stretch.

EDIT: for example, Character.ai as an example of character prompting. You can prime an LLM with a prompt so that it asks you certain types of questions.

Not having a detailed product spec is a much, much bigger problem when you can't change the product to fit your needs on a whim. Beyond that, there's a few layers between "software developer" and "regular people" that complicate your prediction.

While most developers don't hold interface designers in particularly high regard, honestly ask average people what they think of most developer-made interfaces and you'll find out the skill is a lot trickier than it seems. Most developers only think they know what developers do, but they're like many corporate workers see everyone from the head network architect to the community college desktop support intern as "computer people who can fix your email." Most think interface designers primarily work on aesthetics, but most probably aren't even invited to meetings about branding/visual aesthetic/etc...) Going further, many of those designers are savvy enough to write some basic code and likely bodge something into place, especially if they're using some kind of purpose-built interface that can handle things like data model consistency between builds.

It's a very unpopular opinion around here, but I think designers using the next generation of no-code tools will eat front-end and simple app developers' lunches and I think it will happen really soon. I'll bet teams at Wix, Webflow and other no-code authoring tools are working like mad to develop these tools right now, and I'll bet that's a hair's breadth from automatically generating electron apps from whatever users make there. If your specialty is code, and there are people with whole other useful skillsets that could passably approximate that capability with a few occasional hours from a contractor, the developer isn't going to be the one that still has a job.

While the demand for developers is still large, it's not infinite, and I look askance at assumptions that there won't be a really painful 'adjustment' for a lot of working professionals.

That’s assuming frontends need to be ”developed” at all in the future. There’s a possibility intelligent chat bots able to generate microfrontends on the fly is going to eat our lunch, but what is really going to eat the lunches is a failing capitalistic system due too lack of demand for labour. I guess overall society is going to balance things out somehow, curious if it’s going to be a in a civil manner or brutal disruption.

I can only see brutality personally. I’m not prepared. Once I lose my way of making a living I think it’s done basically. Time will tell, but it’s never been kind before, why now?

Many here seem to think anyone "smart enough" or "hardworking enough" could simply pivot into something else after their entire category of employment was decimated. I assume that:

a: These people are very young and don't understand what it takes to invest 3, 4, or 5 decades in a career and/or despite their assumptions about their life experiences, have never actually experienced significant hardship.

b: They're neurologically or emotionally incapable of empathy or lack a usable theory of mind.

c: They've read too much inspirational linkedin hustle porn about people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps (which is actually supposed to be a joke-- it's obviously impossible to pull youself up by your own bootstraps, but for some reason people repeat it without considering its true meaning) and think if they are tough and ruthless enough that they'll be one of the ones on top. Which is kind of sad.

Or a variant of a: they're forgetting how little their first jobs paid.

Even in most lucky case, pivoting your career into an entirely different category means reverting to entry-level pay, while your age, health and obligations remain the same. Imagine just the paycut alone happening to you, out of a sudden. And that's the best case for what people displaced by AI will experience.

I’d pivot into crime and drugs if I had too survive. I’ll be eating no matter what. Not too worried.

You know, they send people to jail over that stuff.

He still gets his food in that case.

Hey they’d still have food/shelter in that scenario…

Yeah, but a lot depends on where they live. From what I heard about the US penal system, someone living there would be better off being homeless than jailed.

For most people who don't already have an established network associated with crime, it would probably be the only way you'd get anybody to trust you.

As someone who spent quite some time as a young person with the fringe end of society, I can assure you that saying you'll pivot into crime and drugs is like saying you'll pivot into being a plumber. It takes time to build a career that pays more then entry level money consistently, and good luck developing a network of connections to make it happen. It's not like walking down the street to pick up an application at Chipotle. And AI is probably going to take individual computer criminals' jobs even before most other people's.

Well, no the point to my comment was that they won't need to be developed, and that the real skill will be in knowing how people interact with things so you can tell the machine what to make, and that is absolutely not a technical job. Even in the interim, incidentally gained technical skills will suffice rendering the technical people in the chain redundant. Surely the human understanding component will be whittled down at some point, too, but it's a much much further goal than automating essentially mechanical processes.

And, of course-- all of the "unpleasant" side effects of massive innovation would be totally avoidable if we didn't treat people as disposable labor units worth nothing more than their market value.

>Surely the human understanding component will be whittled down at some point, too, but it's a much much further goal than automating essentially mechanical processes.

Why do you think that?

People used to think that making paintings and poems would be one of the most difficult things for AI, and look how that turned out.

I don't think the above comment disagrees that much with you. As far as paintings and poems go those are also pulling off of patterns that humans naturally have given off too right? An LLM is a bit more than a stochastic parrot sure, but it's also a large part of how it functions. The real surprise, or maybe not a surprise, is how formulaic everything is.

Because interfaces require situation-specific reasoning that purely expressive art can be imitated without. And frankly, I think the slick looking images that AI spews out from actual artists' munged up work is a far cry from being equivalent. Like interfaces, the people who wouldn't pay an artist or designer to begin with probably don't care enough about the quality of the art or interface for it to matter. Cookie cutter applications and stock images are going to suffer, but developers making basic crud functionality or simple API interactions will suffer soon after.

> It's a very unpopular opinion around here, but I think designers using the next generation of no-code tools will eat front-end and simple app developers' lunches and I think it will happen really soon. I'll bet teams at Wix, Webflow and other no-code authoring tools are working like mad to develop these tools right now, and I'll bet that's a hair's breadth from automatically generating electron apps from whatever users make there.

I'm sure Wix et al are indeed working on that. Looking at their website, they've been at it for 17 years and have a whole bunch of high-level things already available — meaning "blog" and "eCommerce" and "scheduling", not merely "fancy checkbox" or "date widget" — which will cover the needs of a lot of small businesses who neither want nor could afford a single full-time web dev for even just 3 months.

Nevertheless, I disagree with your core claim: I learned how HTML worked partly by reading the output of Dreamweaver[0], followed by teens working with REALbasic (now Xojo) and then VisualBasic. I also spent most of the last decade using Interface Builder in Xcode (with 1.5 years of "why did you do this in C++?" and 1.5 years of "why won't Xcode render this SwiftUI like it's supposed to?").

I don't understand why the visual editors aren't more popular in our profession — they seem like they should be perfect; SwiftUI and React shouldn't need to even exist — and it's that gap between how I think the world ought to work and how I observe it actually working that contains the real problem that means so many of the jobs we do, aren't with the no-code tools we already had 25 years ago.

(Of course, one possibility is that Upton Sinclair quote: “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”, and perhaps we're all just in a bubble of belief that can collapse at any time…)

[0] I think. Something like that anyway, free demo on a Mac[Format|World|User] magazine cover CD.

I'm not totally sure, but you seem to be conflating knowing how to design interfaces and being able to code them? They're not even in the same career trajectory. I could be misreading what you meant.

You're misreading, but thanks for asking :)

I mean that there are (and have been for decades) tools which designers can use directly, that should mean that nobody has to code any UI.

> I expect our work will change: we'll be able to spend more time thinking about what we are building and less time typing code on our keyboards. But if anything, we're going to become more valuable - because we'll be able to get a whole lot more done.

That would be lovely, but not how efficiency works in a capitalistic society. We can produce cars much faster in a factory then we could in the past due to various factors including automation. This doesn't mean the workers get to take their time and a do a better job. Instead it means they are expected to have a higher volume.

This is what I worry about with the rise of LLM programming (especially as someone who is less than impressed with the actual output I've seen). It's not that I as a software engineer will be replaced by someone using GPT, but rather it's I'll be replaced by another software engineer who doesn't care, using GPT to produce 3x as much "software" at half the quality because the only metric that some will look at is volume.

That will never happen because business changes requirements on an hourly basis :)

Jokes aside, I think you kind of need to know how to problem solve in code to even know in which direction to go.

If I tell it, create a Facebook - the limit will kick in. But most people do not konw how to destructure Facebook in terms of functionality and what components are.

This inspired me to try and get a sprite sheet with the top down animations for a paladin for a potential RPG game. See me fail here: https://imgur.com/a/2uJyUT3

Actual order was top down variants first, and then the last one was the side view as I was curious what it'd show.

I've used midjourney to create ttrpg tokens in the past, and the best way I was able to do so was to say "aerial view" -- top down was very flakey in if it would work. I wonder if Dall-E 3 needs the same guidance.

Are there any plagiarism detection tools for software? Because I'm very curious how closely this code matches one of the many JS Angry Bird clone tutorials out there.

There is always GitHub search.

Someone showed me a similar game type thing they had made with GPT-4 and I could find the code that it had used just by searching Github. It had taken an open source project and made some modifications and spliced a few extra bits together - which is still impressive but the bulk of it was already out there. This matched my limited experience too, unsurprisingly it does a lot better for problems where there is already code and discussion out there.

I wasn't able to find exact code for the posted game though so I think something cleverer may have occurred!

> any resemblance is purely coincidental

Err.. no it's not. It's trained on this stuff. It definitely knows how those games work after being trained on countless articles describing those games in detail.

Cool project nonetheless though!

FYI, it was sarcasm (the emoji at the end is the giveaway)

I honestly don't think the coding is that impressive. What sells it is the assets. It used to be that all quick demos / gamejam like games like these (which it honestly is) looked like crap. Now it suddenly can look a bit polished. Not just boxes and lines, but actually somewhat nice graphics (which is probably too close to what it mimics and would end with a angry letter from a bird attorney if was used in an actual game, though).

new game idea. Angry letters!

Isn't this largely because there are dozens of angrybird clones on github where the ai could learn from?

Do GTA next :D

Yes it is. Same with flappy birds dude from Tencent. Try to do a simple game that is less found on internet, some obscure board game and you'll see how ChatGPT fails spectacularly. For those who knows Witcher 3 game, try asking ChatGPT to implement Gwent board game found within W3 world, or try to implement the board game Orlog that is found within the world of Assassin's Creed Valhalla game. See those implementations how they go - no need to do a GTA complex style one.

I don't see why you'd fail. With a more obscure game, you need to elaborate on details some more. E.g. describe the specific rule instead of saying "like in Angry Birds".

Well the fact is that it does not really learn. So yes you go ahead and explain in detail what will be forgotten once the context exceeds 8k tokens

Sure, but no one says you have to get it to write you the whole game in one session. Divide and conquer! As long as you keep the work items small enough to solve them within 8k context limit, GPT-4 will be able to help you with all of it!

Creating a collection of system prompts to select from, as well as plain old copy-paste, are two tools you can use to provide the same context to multiple sessions, with little to zero effort.

yes and no. it will forget about your properties and structs just the same way it will forget about keys design decisions.

Within a session, not unless you stay under context window limit. Between sessions, it's up to the user to carry over relevant context.

It would be very interesting to see a post about this then please. For me it has definitely been an issue that anything meaningful will take multiple files and henceforth cap my input for it.

I'm trying something like this with 3.5; the problem is that it keeps changing its mind about what the API "should" look like for the other parts it can't remember in context. As I'm using it as a collaborator, this is actually fine, but it wouldn't work if I was trying to 1-shot it or otherwise use pure LLM output.

I wouldn't expect this to work well with GPT-3.5. And, with GPT-4 available, I wouldn't bother trying; there's too big a capability difference between the two. However, it's nice to know 3.5 is still somewhat useful here.

The super power of GPT is allowing a generalist to become specialists in diverse disciplines just-in-time.

I wouldn't say specialist, because GPT often ignores full context of the information. Sometimes, if a system is composed of A B C D E, and you only mention the first 4, it will answer with no problem as if E was irrelevant. As soon as you introduce E, then, it will quickly say sorry and reconsider. I'm a true hardcore generalist, and gpt can help a lot, but I wouldn't say I can become a specialist with it because it doesn't investigate at all - if you don't mention it, a lot of times it's as if it doesn't even exist.

As a technical generalist I certainly find myself pretty empowered by these LLMs. It's never been easier to dive into a new problem, figure out the boundaries and solution paths and get cracking.

I'd be more interested in seeing AI create a game that doesn't already exist.

AI auto-plagiarism is a neat party trick, but can it create something new?

+1 for this especially for anything other than CRUD or an already exciting game like Angry Birds where the first GitHub searches will return several results

Angry Birds itself was sufficiently fresh and well made so people liked it.

But it wasn’t really original in a true sense.

One of the most appreciated games in nerd culture currently is the new Baldur’s Gate. It’s extremely well made, but not really original.

Factorio or The Witness would be games that are both original and have been made with great technical and artistic care. But how many of these are made in comparison to genre games and mashups?

I don’t think these tools are necessarily a hindrance to create good games. Tools are just tools.

The question is not about a game’s freshness. The question is wether procedural generators such as chatgpt can generate something truly new or is limited to its plagiarised parameters - which seems to be the case.

> Angry Birds itself was sufficiently fresh and well made so people liked it.

'Crush The Castle' was an earlier Flash game with the same mechanics as Angry Birds. Angry Birds just gave it appealing characters and visuals.

Here's the code: https://bestaiprompts.art/angry-pumpkins/sketch.js

This was amazing work. I consistently underestimate what generative AI can do.

Also: I think you just scared the daylights out of a lot of mobile game developers and inspired many more.

Mobile games are a mix of half-arsed Steam game ports, polished ad-budget-driven exploitation machines and trash. I think the trash producers will be excited, not scared. The other two kinds won't care.

How do I read the Twitter thread if I don't have an account?

You should be able to replace twitter.com with nitter.net

https://nitter.net/javilopen/status/1719363262179938401

The same way you deal with pay walled news articles. Sign up, check archives/cache, or move on.

I don't have one either but I could read it on Mastodon. If it helps someone:

https://fosstodon.org/@javilopen@bird.makeup/111332485943091...

On one hand - there are a lot of angry birds clones and tutorials showing you how to code an angry birds game, the choice of game here probably greatly helped the outcome.

On the other hand - the way he iteratively programmed it (https://twitter.com/javilopen/status/1719363669685916095) I can see becoming more and more useful over time.

It's obviously not the most difficult example to use, but it does indicate a very interesting future.

I've literally just finished writing a Wordpress plugin with ChatGPT.

It took me a few hours to build functionality that would normally need a paid plugin, and most of that time was spent working out the features. Woocommerce are charging a $50 subscription for basically the same thing.

It's fantastic to be able to have an idea for something and prototype and iterate it rapidly, without having to struggle with the implementation details.

$50 per what? Month? Year?

https://woo.com/posts/woocommerce-pricing/

"WooCommerce and WordPress are both free, open source software."

He never said woo itself was paid, he said plugin... Which they very much do charge money for.

$49 per year in this instance [0].

Base WooCommerce is free, but a large amount of the functionality you need to actually build a working store is provided by additional plugins.

Most of these have a freemium model where the features you actually need are gated behind a monthly or yearly subscription. More than a few of these plugins and the monthly price can easily be more than something like Shopify, especially when factoring in hosting.

Each of these plugins also feel like they need to justify the cost, so often come larded with their own dashboards, UIs and other junk, whereas a simple script would often be better.

[0] https://woo.com/products/custom-product-tabs-manager/

Great! Think about all the millions of AI-generated games we can now make to complement the millions of other human-made games that are released everyday, of which we only manage to play like 0.1%!

I can see this being used to maybe accelerate (even more) content generation for generic addictive MMOs and gacha games, but hopefully not much more.

As if we are not already overflowing with useless, meaningless, heartless, superficial content everywhere…

OK, but tell us how you really feel.

What a grumpy cynical take. We are also overflowing with useless, heartless, meaningless, superficial book content everywhere, doesn't mean Gutenberg should have dropped his printing press idea. Cream rises to the top, even if that means we have more chaff at the bottom.

Your comparison is completely unrelated. Gutenberg gave people the means to distribute their work, not quickly generate soulless garbage that looks real on the surface.

Maybe it’s just my personal take on gaming, but a good game for me is one that is designed with care and with interesting human-made content. Something that tells a good story, or presents an interesting challenge. Would you read a book written by an AI printed with the help of a Gutenberg press? If yes, then what is your goal when consuming art?

There's no use of having such a pessimistic view of the world. The 0.1% of games you play are the really good ones. If more games are made, that percentage may go down, but in absolute terms there will be some games that will be very good to play.

Yes, but sifting through it is really boring and time-consuming. That’s not the point, though; if this was a tool that helped people express themselves better and more efficiently, then I’d be totally up for the increased amount of output. But what’s the gain in giving people the ability to quickly generate soulless art and entertainment? Just because it’s “fast”?

Not all technology is automatically good. LinkedIn sounds like a great idea on paper, and look at what it is in practice.

This is very cool! It's not as impressive, but here is a video of me writing Game of Life only by speaking out loud to VS Code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NSplhZ0DlY

I did that by building an open source VS Code extension to interact with GPT3.5/4 directly from your editor: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Biggles..... It cuts out copy/pasting between ChatGPT and your editor, or writing any boiler plate code since you can just ask it to insert the code you want, or change the code you have highlighted. You can also talk to it directly using the Whisper API!

Even if I'm reinventing the wheel I like to create. Idk guess I'm a luddite. I wouldn't feel proud/happy that I got a game created from a code generator. But it's good it empowers other people to make stuff without that wall of learning.

Do you think this worked so cleanly because there is a tutorial similar to this and its in the dataset?

https://github.com/liabru/matter-js/wiki/Tutorials

This is brilliant. I also created a ChatGPT plugin using only GPT-4. Aardvark AI (Search for Products on Google Shopping in Real-Time, No Ads, Only Trusted Stores) It current gets around 6000-8000 search queries each month.

BTS: It uses Google Shopping API to get real time results.

Can you give us the link? I m curious.

Unfortunately, there's no direct link. You need a ChatGPT Plus subscription. Go to plugin store and search for Aardvark AI.

Are you monetizing this?

Yes. It's making around 150/month through affiliate ads. My API expenses are around $50. I've listed the plugin for sale on Acquire.com as I don't have time to work on it.

I searched around and couldn't find it.

NVM found it https://app.acquire.com/startup/JIMnCudbdtWDIvRP2A1guBvB70T2...

We’re living in interesting times, especially from AI, ML and coding point of view. The possibilities seem endless and the reach of such tools is going to lead to an “explosion” of creativity.

I would suggest that the past is likely a good guide in this case. Personal Computers, easier languages, HTML, World Wide Web did not really make non-creative people into creative people. I can really speak for myself. I can copy some things, but I rarely can glue and remix them together in a way that make them desirable. Personally, this is the same way I see the AI. There is potential here sure, but I do not think 2 million angry bird clones is an actual threat to a creative. Now, it will hurt low effort crap, but there is so much low effort crap out there already..

I agree with you with one small reservation. This tech is an excellent way to get quick prototypes out. Most people will never go beyond that so we will see a lot more crap. But for the people that do, being able to prototype something quickly could result in some noticeably new ideas.

It is interesting to watch. Especially as an arch in "my life with technology", this time around I'm a bystander watching what people can do with it and it is impressive. My tinkering as not been as fruitful. I feel like my grandparents that never caught on to Google-fu but, just like my grandparents, I'm ok with it.

Cool! The coolest here is not the game, it's the fact that AI is being used for software development. Actually ChatGPT is used for more serious and practical applications. But I started with games too. Having fun makes it easier to start. You can think of AI (today) as very knowledgeable and not very smart assistant. Complex project requires a lot of prompts. Human's task is to put it all together, test, ask for new parts and corrections. And this is just a beginning...

I realize this comment isn’t directly related to the article, but it got me thinking… I wonder what effect AI will have on the next generation of gaming consoles.

Will they get beefier GPU capabilities to leverage local models?

Will they use cloud capacity to host models and games require always-online capability to play as intended?

Some mixture of both?

Also, I hope that AI won’t turn into the next way to just ruin everything that was already good. A bunch of rehashed unoriginal ideas, like “it’s Pac-Man, but with AI!” Please, no.

This is interesting, but, the "nothing but AI" part is clearly not true and so I'm not exactly sure what was done here.

What do you mean?

You’re saying that based on what? All the code and assets are AI.

The music?

There's AI for that too, now.

But it wasn't used to generate the music in this "game" that isn't a game. This was my point - that it is unclear exactly what AI did and did not do in this case. Like, I'm 100% sure my mom could not have done this, so, not "all" AI like the title says.

>"game" that isn't a game.

Why is it not a game? I even played it a bit -- was I hallucinating?

The Angry Pumpkins game doesn't have sound effects or music - you can play it here: https://bestaiprompts.art/angry-pumpkins/index.html

The Twitter thread shows exactly what the AI made. It was used for the JavaScript code and the image assets.

If you don't have a Twitter account you can see the full content on Nitter https://nitter.net/javilopen/status/1719363262179938401 or in my Gist copy: https://gist.github.com/simonw/f7ed52daaa66f849858d17e0d6c1c...

What music? There is none.

yep, advent of chatgpt will enable software proliferation before anything else, developers have become far more powerful now, they can create in more languages and understand complex concepts faster. This will only continue until AI is good enough to work in an agent-like manner with reliable output, afterwhich, who knows what will happen.

You can copy Angry Birds with nothing but Google[1].

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=angry+birds+clone

The real challenge is generating a large code base (think more than a JavaScript loaded page) - the front end backend and everything in between and then automating the testing and deployment …

Prob needed to a ton of glue code to have it at quality

Aside from the images I suspect the code is inspired by something in the training data since it's quite a common project

One of the prompts they used was:

"Now, I ask you: do you know how the birds are launched in Angry Birds? What the finger does on the screen? Exactly. Add this to the game, using the mouse."

Does it generate the same result for everyone who enters the prompts? (Not an AI guy here)

No, it won't. There's a big random element to this, especially when you are prompting GPT-4 directly through the ChatGPT interface.

Image generation models can sometimes produce the exact same image if you fix the seed they are using - there are different procedures for doing that for different image models.

LLMs like GPT-4 can have their "temperature" dialled down, but even at 0 they aren't guaranteed to return exactly the same response to a given prompt. I believe this is because they run floating point operations in parallel across multiple GPUs and floating point arithmetic isn't actually commutative - you can get back a slightly different result if the multiplications run in a different order.

This is exciting, like we’re about to enter a new golden age for indie apps and games.

Pretty impressive! Using AI as a copilot is definitely the right way forward.

idk why it wasnt obvious to me before, i never bothered trying to make games because i wasnt good at digital art and didn't really have the interest to try to be. i should now... lol

We are still lacking a reliable method to generate animated sprites. I’m very excited about the prospect of that day arriving sometime soon.

I call bullshit. No prompts, no nothing, just the finished product and a few claims.

Almost 200 comments and Ctrl-F "repro" is zero.

Also let me be straight: I am full-on believer in AI. But not in Midjourney, DALL•E 3 and GPT-4 (or other LLMs) - these are not real AI, just VP hype cycle artifacts.

>No prompts, no nothing, just the finished product

Did you read beyond the first tweet?

There are 6 tweets in the thread: announcement, link to the game, introduction, graphics, programming, conclusion.

These tweets do not describe the exact and specific steps to reproduce the complete result. They only provide rough and obvious (for anyone ever interacted with GPT) advice, as is par for the course for AI hyping.

This:

> And from there, keep asking for more and more things. And every time something goes wrong, clearly explain the mistake and let it fix it. Patience!

Is pathetic, and proves exactly nothing.

Yep, I did not do that all the times I tried to actually see why GPT4 is so popular, thanks a lot for advice!

What is "real" AI to you? And if a lot of people derive real value out of this new wave of gen AI, but you don't, does that say more about gen AI or more about you?

> What is "real" AI to you?

An AI able to reason, obviously. Ideally able to reason better than human - and be able to explain the universe better than humans did so far. So don't feed me hallucinating LLM stupidity.

> And if a lot of people derive real value out of this new wave of gen AI, but you don't, does that say more about gen AI or more about you?

Good question! I'd say, given the state of things, that it says more about people.

Despite the expected contrarianism in the comments, and I promise I'm being positive here, I'm pretty sure GPT-4 did really well on this task because a quick Google search shows a bunch of existing projects spanning blogs, GitHub and YouTube that it almost certainly trained on:

https://www.google.com/search?q=matter.js+angry+birds+clone

This is not a Bad Thing (tm) -- it's actually really sick because you can quickly get out of the weeds and get productive, especially if your skillset is not as deep as you'd have needed to accomplish even half of this a decade ago.

Nobody ever said paint by numbers was capital-P "Painting", but sometimes it's a blast to do one. I remember being 12 and making custom WADs for Doom / Hexen; my 6th grade son builds endlessly-creative and complicated modded Minecraft worlds with detailed machinery and electrical circuits and all this crazy seemingly-adherent-to-real-world-physics shit. Angry Pumpkins is arguably an order of magnitude better than simply re-skinning a Cyberdemon, because lowering the "time-to-screen" with any project (and in this case, providing a blueprint) is fun, creative, and most importantly ENCOURAGING for the next generation.

Anyways, I like it!

That’s a really interesting perspective. Thank you for sharing.

Thanks for writing this. This really mirrors my own perspective. Yeah, these tools aren't exactly "learning to fish," but if this gets someone excited about "fishing', then that's a good thing. A lot of my early coding experiences were in a similar vein to what you described, altering gamemaker projects and things like that. And even now I have a lot of fun playing with this AI stuff. It can help me go from 0 to 20% on something I previously knew nothing about, and sometimes that initial boost is all I need to get over the friction and actually do something cool. Or sometimes I realize that it's not worth the amount of effort it would take to go to the next 80%. That's OK too.

I totally understand the cynicism around this stuff, but for me it's like... 99% exciting and cool.

Ok, but many of these AI tools are promoted as Programming bots with a capital-P

That's just marketing. McDonalds will sell you what it calls a Hamburger with a capital-H, but we could argue endlessly about the veracity of that.

In the end it doesn't matter -- some people like it, some people hate it, it's good, it's terrible, it's whatever you at this moment in your life decide it is for you, but regardless of opinions, it's still edible.

I just love what this guy made mostly because he followed through and made something, anything, and put it out there (presumably for the pure joy of creation).. and it got us all talking about it lol

> That's just marketing. McDonalds will sell you what it calls a Hamburger with a capital-H, but we could argue endlessly about the veracity of that.

Well they can't sell you a quarter pound of horse meat as third of a pound of beef. There are laws about this and I believe they do deserve criticism. But that criticism is completely orthogonal to how good the "hamburger" tastes and the nutritional value of it.

But personally I could never do marketing. I feel like their skills lay in getting as close to a lie as possible without technically being one. But I also think this is why people are not happy with a lot of products, because they aren't getting what they were expected. But at the same time I think companies are in an arms race that has simply been a race to the bottom where we're at or near and no one can get an economic edge simply by telling the whole truth and nothing but the unquestionable truth. The (near) liars have the distinct advantage in a world where it is impossible to have objective validators. It's why we have reviewers but why reviewers also got metric hacked. Idk what the solution here is but I definitely understand why people are upset and I wouldn't call this a fruitful endeavour where we'll argue endlessly. That's more about people having difficulties in expressing why they feel frustrated.

And some people think Synthesia is actually teaching them piano.

It might get them into the door. It might give them all they are seeking and that’s all awesome. They might find that they hit a wall and need to go learn how to read sheet music. Or they don’t.

The thing about “it’s not real programming” is that I don’t think it matters. They might just end up a bit surprised that they hit a wall and have to go back and learn more of the fundamentals.

AI is good at that too

I learned just enough about “chord progressions” in order to ask ChatGPT to make both the lyrics and chord progressions for me

I just input them and humans like it

I wouldn’t have initially known the terms to use. Nowadays I can prompt for that too though “what concepts do I need to understand in this field” “tell me more about number 3” and I hope it didn’t just make something up but it’s good enough to converse with humans about - who also make things up

At best, I expect it will maybe reach parity with (more likely fall short of) the kind of accessibility that other low-code application development tools and WYSIWYG website builders have reached. Specifically, I can see where this kind of utility will be too limited for professionals and skilled amateurs to bother with, beyond maybe doing some kind of “boilerplate+”, and yet it will remain out of reach for the vast majority of laypeople who will quickly realize that programming requires more than just a grasp of syntax and an IDE. Square Space and Wix haven’t meaningfully impacted the professional web design market as near as I can tell, and Airtable hasn’t cost any SQL engineers their jobs.

Just my gut instinct, though, and I’ve certainly been wrong before.

Sure, and that deserves more critique than this. But the critique there is that you're being marketed a product under false pretenses. I'll give you an example to help clarify. In another thread[0] the OP is showing off their ML programming assistant. The project is unquestionably cool and has every right to be on the front page of HN. But there are still major questions I have. The implicit critique here comes form the fact that the author says "beats GPT 4 at coding" but then their basis for this claim is simply via HumanEval performance. In reality the evidence does not support the claim (it doesn't say the contrary either, it simply is indeterminate -- not to be confused with orthogonal/irrelevant). This is marketing. I'm not sure if it is dishonest marketing, but I would not call it honest marketing either. It's in the gray. The thread originally had an intro from OP who was specifically requesting comments too and so the context is appropriate, other than the nature of simply being on HN.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38091869

Well, most programming is just doing what was done before again?

Anecdotally a lot of my coworkers seem to say they did something ‘with chatgpt’.

I like it too. I also wrote a negative comment, but it was about how the title was not completely honest, which is a different issue than whether or not this was an impressive feat of AI.

I just like that I don’t need to hire designers anymore

I didn’t mind designers or their cost, I minded the time and the gamble involved with output close to what you imagined, and revisions

I also found negotiating rights to be full of hubris and pride that caused alot of more friction. Ironclad contracts being too heavy handed with that community

I’ll take the potential forfeit of copyright in exchange for instant output, i can put up a payment portal for royalty free works, i can still sell data

> This is not a Bad Thing (tm)

I wholeheartedly agree. I am often one to critique ML systems, especially LLMs and GPT. But this is my training as a researcher. I think it is important that we recognize critiques and discussions of limitations are not equivalent to calling a tool useless or worthless. It does not even devalue the tool. Rather the discussions are beneficial for two contexts: we learn the limitations to build better tools (since no tool is perfect there will always be critiques available) and we learn how to use the tool effectively (you're still not going to use LLMs to do you differential equations homework despite this certainly being within the training set). There's also the important context that we are on a tech form in a community that is well known to be inhabited by the exact type of people that build, test, and deploy these types of systems (myself included). These are not the same discussions we'd be having in the context of sitting around with my parents who are absolutely tech illiterate.

My thoughts as a highly critical person (check my history, or even a very recent highly relevant comment in another thread) are "this is pretty fucking cool" (same to that very same thread btw). I hope to see more stuff like this. It is what makes me passionate about ML and it is what keeps me coming to HN.

Your work doesn't need to be novel to be useful. Nor does it need to be useful to be good. I'm just happy to be seeing people do shit and having fun.

Very good perspective from the creator's vantage point.

From the consumer vantage point, I do worry. Even Apple's "curated" App Store is already flooded with quickly made knockoffs... as close as they can get in the hopes that they'll confuse just a few folks into a purchase. It works well enough and it's profitable enough that an entire industry does factory-style it for every popular title. (Like a digital Shein.)

The internet is already full of the quick-launch low-value-add content that AI excels at creating. We're about to see a whole lot more! The good news is AI can also be very effective at prescreening and filtering out all this content vying for our eyeballs. Right now it feels like me vs the AI content cannon, but soon it will be AI filters battling AI content while the machines sort out what makes it to my digital devices.

Honestly there's enough junk content out there that I don't see generative AI making much of a difference.

What we need is better habits around peer-to-peer recommendation. I need people I know with good taste to spend more time talking about the games that they like!

Are there Reddit subs for that?

If anyone can join a subreddit you can't guarantee that spammers won't join up to promote junk.

I'm having great recommendations from invite-only Discords these days.

Not all of us have access to elite invite-only communities, nor the name recognition or clout to solicit invites to them.

Create your own and invite people who's opinions and taste you respect to join it.

Twitter is a bad place to share original content these days, because anyone without a Twitter account not only won't be able to see anything more than the first tweet but (crucially) won't even see a visual indicator that there IS more content to see.

Here's a screenshot to illustrate: https://gist.github.com/simonw/f7ed52daaa66f849858d17e0d6c1c...

For people without a Twitter account, I've pasted the content of the thread into a Gist here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/f7ed52daaa66f849858d17e0d6c1c...

The most important missing link is the live demo, https://bestaiprompts.art/angry-pumpkins/index.html

There's Nitter.net for now, thankfully.

Nitter link: https://nitter.net/javilopen/status/1719363262179938401

There’s a list of Nitter instances here, if the flagship instance isn’t working (this happens from time to time): https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

Oh I wasn't aware there were other instances. Thanks!

And also, who knows where Twitter will be in a year. This could all disappear in a black whole judging by the somewhat chaotic developments.

I have an account and half the time when I follow a link from HN to Twitter / X it just throws an error that something went wrong / can't load the tweet. And video content works even less often than that. The site seems like it barely works at this point and is rapidly becoming a ghost town. What a waste.

Twitter is a bad place to share original content these days

It might be but it's an interminable debate that's mostly HN-offtopic since its been long rendered uninteresting through sheer repetition.

I don't think that's the case.

I have seen plenty of complaints on here about Twitter in general, but I don't think the specific point that the new registration wall makes it a bad place to post original content has been discussed much here at all.

Happy to be proved wrong.

Edit: proving myself wrong here: it looks like links to nitter show up in comments here every few days, so the fact that the Twitter registration wall needs to be bypassed is actually pretty well understood. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

It is so much the case there's a site guideline about it plus countless mod comments.

The registration thing is just like the paywall thing - if there are workarounds, it's fine.

As someone that has never had a Twitter account, I used to be able to see more of the "thread" or whatever it's called. Something has recently changed to where that's no longer the case and I can now only see the first post with absolutely zero way to access the rest.

Yes that sucks, the trouble is commentary on how and why it sucks tends to (inadvertently) take over the thread which is what the GP comment did and which is why they're better avoided/get moderated.

Always instructional how eager a lot of people are to not pay artists.

I'm guessing the mood will be less celebratory when we can stop paying most programmers.

This article is about replacing programmers with AI.

I, personally, will celebrate, since it'll allow me to explore opportunities I would not have time for on my own. And I'm not worried for my career, since 99% of people will still be unable to think and write coherently enough to use the AI tools.

And I think the reality here is not so much being unwilling to pay artists as the budget being extremely low. If I've got an art budget of $10 for a quick experiment like this, I'm not going to hire an artist, I'm just going to use the circle tool in GIMP.

This article is about precisely nothing, as almost all AI articles are.

By the way, I have a nice bridge for sale.

It's interesting how most don't consider programmers artists, even though coding requires quite a bit of creativity.

Did you read the actual post? They use generative AI to replace both programmers AND artists. And if anything programmers have been at risk of replacement FAR longer than traditional artists. Low code solutions in the form of Squarespace for web programming, AirTable for CRUD, Unity for making games, the list goes ON AND ON.

So AI made a cheap copy of something people made...Can it do anything else?

It's apparently pretty good at annoying people on HN who like to downplay its every achievement

> It's apparently pretty good at annoying people on HN who like to downplay its every achievement

It's not really "its" achievement. There are many open source repositories of Flappy Bird that it was trained on and there are many brilliant engineers at Google and OpenAI who have worked on LLM technology. It is their achievement if anything. It is a product. A product of others' achievement. You don't say Excel had an achievement when it calculates a good formula for you? Do you say a neural network that produces great speech to text had an achievement? Or do say the people who developed it did.

>Do you say a neural network that produces great speech to text had an achievement? Or do say the people who developed it did.

Sure Why not? The engineers at google and open ai or wherever else trained the models but they didn't teach it how to do anything it does because they don't know how to teach it to do anything it does. So yeah the achievement is on the neural network.

Many people gave the likes of alpha go achievement on super human Go play.

> So yeah the achievement is on the neural network.

It is? OK, tell them to completely clear the model of any angry bird original and clone code, data and assets that it scarfed from the Internet.

It can retain scarfed definitions of angry and bird as well as scarfed information on making a 2D video game.

Then tell the model to create the game and see what if anything it comes up with.

In terms of the code, I don't think it would be hard to create an Angry Bird clone of this quality using a GPT-4 scale model that had somehow had all knowledge of Angry Birds excluded from it.

Most of the Angry Birds mechanics in this demo come from the underlying Matter 2D library. Relevant demo here: https://brm.io/matter-js/demo/#slingshot

Honestly, that's most of the code part accounted for.

The bigger question is the graphical assets. The developer shared their prompts for those here: https://twitter.com/javilopen/status/1719363587351740711

Some of them make no mention of Angry Birds - "Wooden box. Large skeleton bone. Item assets sprites. White background. In-game sprites" - but others do: "Item assets sprites. Wooden planks. White background. In-game sprites. Similar to Angry Birds style"

My hunch is that a skilled image prompter could still get to results that were right for this particular demo even with a model that had not seen Angry Birds assets before.

We have exactly the same argument on a regular basis about whether or not we should say Musk is responsible for the success of Tesla; likewise with attributing the achievements of the USA[0] (or even just the government of the USA[0]) to the specific president of the time rather than to the nation as a whole.

And before Musk was born, similar debates about describing Armstrong as the first man on the moon, given how even saying that inherently brushes aside the contributions of all those who worked on the mission without going to space.

[0] In the UK it seems to be half on the Prime Minister and half the party of the age; I don't pay enough attention to the local opinion of politics elsewhere, though I will say the British press seems to blame everything Germany does on the German Chancellor personally…

Which, precisely, achievement?

Show all prompts step-by-step and let people reproduce.

Someone claims they did X using a couple of AI instruments, without sharing anything to prove the claim, and everyone is excited. I understand that the industry needs a new hype to keep going, but this is just pathetic.

>Show all prompts step-by-step and let people reproduce.

Read beyond the first tweet.

I see six tweets in the thread, how many do you see?

If you also see six tweets, please reproduce the result following instructions in the tweets and share the recording of you doing so.

Graphics don't matter, let sprites be colored rectangles.

>Graphics don't matter, let sprites be colored rectangles.

Why? Are the sprites and backgrounds too easy to recreate with MJ and Dall-e after you realized that the author actually provided the prompts for them?

You misunderstood. I am trying to make the task easier for you.

Just reproduce the code with LLM of your choosing. If you manage to actually do so - please feel free to add graphics with any other model.

Come on... I'm fairly cynical when it comes to AI but someone building a pretty complete game from scratch entirely using AI to generate the code and assets is a little beyond it 'making a cheap copy of something else'.

I mean while impressive all the art assets were very clearly knockoffs of Angry Bird's art.

If you fed a competent human massive quantities of human-created code and artwork, they could fairly quickly mash it up and produce a clone of a simple game, too.

Have we created real AI, or merely 'AP' - Auto-Plagiarism?

I doubt it

Except it didn't.

Everyone will think this impressive, but they’re not game developers.

You could literally make all this in probably 24 hours and not spend any time mucking around with prompts.

Like what are we even seeing here? Basically a tech demo of a physics engine, a little UI interaction for throwing a collidable entity into other entities, and some code for setting up a level?

Show me the maintenance, adding new features, bug fixing, cross platform compatibility, shaders, networking code, sound, etc.

And, most importantly, marketing.

You could argue then that this reduces the barrier to entry for people to become game developers.

Isn’t everything you just listed (physics engine, UI, collide entities) how you make a simple game? It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t have networking code, shaders, or sound. Those things can be added later.

I don’t think it’s productive to gatekeep who is and isn’t a game developer. They developed a game, that makes them a game developer—it doesn’t matter how they got there.

I'm not sure how this reduces the barrier to game developement. There are already lots of free assets and game engines designed for making arcade games that are a lot easier then say Unity or Unreal. Like https://arcade.makecode.com/ or https://microstudio.dev/ or https://scratch.mit.edu/. And if you don't want to make arcade games there are other tools like RPG Maker, RenPy, GDevelop, and many more each of which are much easier to use then this AI pipeline (not to say it isn't impressive you can do this with AI though) and will lead to better outcomes of actually understanding game development.

All of those things require me to write code, in an annoying, slow, hard to debug click-drag format. I'd rather the AI write the code for me based on my natural language description of what I want.

My point is there isn’t a “correct” way to become a game developer— by your own response you showed that there are frameworks you can use, WYSIWYG editors, you can code a framework from scratch in a high- or low-level language, or you can work with an AI to make something that works.

This person successfully developed a game. Just because it isn’t how others would have done it doesn’t minimize the result.

I think some gatekeeping is warranted. If I stitch a wound it doesn’t suddenly mean I’m a doctor.

Similarly, using AI to develop a game makes you as much of a game developer as someone who hires someone to make a game for them. And some development studios are basically that, people hiring developers to make games. But AI can’t compete well with that.

It’s like coming up with a new fusion power plant, but it takes more energy to run than what it produces. Inspiring, but useless.

Angry Pumpkins did not exist. Now it does. In time for Halloween. You can't refute that.

Using a computer to write a letter makes you as much of a writer as someone how hites someone to write a letter for you. And some writers are basically that, hiring scribes to write for them. Computer can't compete well with that.

Except it does.

Did I miss the link to download the app or something? Where does it exist?

https://bestaiprompts.art/angry-pumpkins/index.html (it's in the second tweet)

Oh, I don't have a twitter account so only see the linked tweet

I used the nitter link someone linked in the HN comment section.

Yeah, being a doctor is a certifiable profession— there are tests, governing bodies, standardized curriculum— are you saying the same exists for “game developer”, a role which could mean a hobbyist, indie developer, or someone working at a huge studio?

This really sounds like “real programmers write in assembly” to me. An AI is a tool, not dissimilar from a higher level language. This person used a tool to create something that didn’t exist before. The result is right there.

Yeah the killer feature here is being able to generate premium-looking game assets without any art team or funding. That's always been the tough part of creating even simple games for solo programmers. The rest is whatever.

>ou could literally make all this in probably 24 hours and not spend any time mucking around with prompts.

I couldn’t make that art in 24 days.

The big thing about the state of current AI isn’t that it does a bunch of things, it’s that it drastically increases the number of people who can do things.

That is, I could not make this game in a day before AI. With it, maybe I could. I am far from unique.

And it drastically increases the number of things a person can do.

> it’s that it drastically increases the number of people who can do things.

Giving the whole world blogspot.com 20 years ago didn't measurably improve the internet, it just added a few more winners and a gigantic increase in low-quality spam pollution.

If you’re saying blogspot is in the same ball park as generative AI I just don’t know how we can continue.

Bloggers have broken news well in advance of large news outlets, partially because of the ability to publish online rapidly, without knowing HTML or administering a web server.

But it's mostly been used to pollute the internet with useless spam. With generative AI, the same thing will happen. The very example shown here is an Angry Birds clone, patient zero of the pay-to-win hellscape of mobile games. I don't think it's an accident that they had AI in their hands and decided to build that.

You don’t need to know HTML to send a tweet either. I would wager more news has broken there.

> With generative AI, the same thing will happen

I’m not sure what your point is. Of course it will. When powerful tools are available and perverse incentives exist, humans will follow them.

But have you seen most programmer art? This has really nice graphics too.

Some people are really good at art, some aren’t.

Regardless, I can pull down some off the shelf assets from an asset store and make a game with them.

Where are the off-the-shelf Halloween-theme Angry Birds-style sprites?

Where are the ones that look different from the ones 50 other game makers used?

I don't know, and now I don't need to care.

I doubt the asset store has a pumpkin in the style of Angry Birds that looks like Red, it doesn't seem a good alternative if he wanted to create this game.

Which imo summarizes what GPT4 is great at - bootstrapping devs who have a general idea of what they want, but are not familiar with the exact specifics of the technology, or need to freshen up their knowledge.

I've learned Kubernetes and Powershell this exact way.

Does 24 hours include learning how to use a game engine that you've never used before? When you've never used ANY game enginer before?

Maintenance and new features are more of the same already done. Networking code is a library. Sound is a library. Cross-platform is a library. Shaders are a library. AI fixed bugs.

Agree. No menus or anything

> Everyone will think this impressive, but they’re not game developers.

I'm a game developer. It's impressive.

I'm extremely aware of how short a game jam demo is compared to an actual product. There's an ocean between the two.

That doesn't diminish how much easier and more approachable it suddenly is for someone with little experience to make a game jam demo, and with kinda-passing art.

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