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Comment by idle_zealot | Hacker News Reader

> Changing a game becomes as simple as modifying a wiki

I feel like an implementation of Pokemon Yellow in a reasonably modern high-level programming language would be easier to reason about and modify than a sprawling wiki written in English.

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Yes, I got the sense from reading this that the author has neither spent a lot of time contributing to a wiki, nor writing software, because both tasks are scarily complex in a way that the blog entry skates over. But then I clicked "About" and I see they are in fact a staff engineer at reddit, so shows what I know.

The hubris of solving social problems with technical solutions is a pipe dream many corporate engineers fall into. I think that's because real social problems, i.e. conflicts, are handled by their managers.

While I've definitely seen the trap you're describing, this isn't it. This is less "solving a social problem with technology" and more "anyone could code if only they didn't need to learn those pesky programming languages". Which is odd to see coming from an engineer who should understand that a programming language is just a precise specification of behavior. I guess the main thought in the blog post is that you don't need to actually specify your problem domain because an LLM can infer the details from context and its training data? Which may be true (at some point) but still doesn't make English a good programming language.

Reddit isn’t known for having great software though.

There is! And it’s not too hard to modify.

https://github.com/pret/pokeyellow

And there's even an example commit showing the exact process needed to add a new Pokemon to Pokemon Yellow:

https://github.com/pret/pokeyellow/pull/102/commits/62e692f7...

Right. You could make adding a Pokemon as simple and predictable as modifying a yaml file.

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