Hacker News Reader

Comment by gregsadetsky | Hacker News Reader

I recently downloaded the source code for Chocolate Doom [0], and even though a ton of human labor has been put into making it cross-platform and easy to build (and that work definitely deserves to be commended!), I still couldn't build it immediately on my M1 MacBook.

Asking Claude Code to build it - literally prompting it "fix whatever needs to be fixed until you get the binary to run" - and waiting ~20 minutes was the best investment of non-time I could do... It definitely felt magical. Claude would tweak headers, `make` it, try to run it, and apply more fixes based on the errors it got back.

Now that I think of it, I regret not opening an issue/PR with its findings...!

(((I then went on to make more vibe-changes to the Doom code and made a video out of those which went semi-viral, which I will now unashamedly plug [1])))

[0] https://github.com/chocolate-doom/chocolate-doom

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcnBXtttF28

View on HN

It builds fine on Linux arm64, what changes did you need to make?

https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=chocolate-doo...

I mean this in the nicest possible way because you were just messing around on a fun thing, but...

I feel like there's a real metaphor here. 86+ people did work over two decades to maintain a cross-platform codebase and that "definitely deserves to be commended", but what "definitely felt magical" was Claude bumbling through header tweaks from compilation errors until the project compiled. And in the end what has AI wrought? A viral video but not anything to give back to the original project. Really there are multiple layers here :)

To be fair, the topic is AI, so of course that's what he's focusing on

1M devs could have worked on it. You can neither fight bit rot nor predict the future.

The point was to get it running, not solve world peace. Without AI, the problem might not have been tackled at all.

Ok, so I tried to build chocolate doom as well (on Debian WSL):

$ git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/chocolate-doom/chocolate-doom

$ cd c*doom; ls

Ok, there is a CMakeFile.txt, so it's probably a cmake project, so:

$ cmake .

Ok, that seems to work, but three libraries are missing, SDL2_Mixer, SDL2_Net and FluidSynth, so lets install them:

$ sudo apt install libsdl2-mixer-dev libsdl2-net-dev libfluidsynth-dev

Let's try again:

$ cmake .

Works, so now for compiling:

$ cmake --build . -j $(nproc)

Build completed in a few seconds first try.

I’m on macOS so sometimes things aren’t as easy :) I’ll give it another try.

So essentially, you are redundant now and celebrate it.

I celebrate that I did not have to spend cycles dealing with a non-interesting, non-intellectually-challenging issue aka figuring out the incantations to make a build system happy.

I'm also celebrating (although I forgot to do this - my bad!) that this automated discovery (i.e. of how to fix the build system for machines such as mine) could have been brought back to the Chocolate Doom community, and made the software better for everyone.

And finally, I'm also celebrating that this allowed my (if I may speak so boldly) creativity to express itself by helping me quickly bring a funny idea to life and share it, hopefully entertaining the world/making at least one person laugh/chuckle.

I don't see how any of this makes me redundant though. Efficient? Lazy? Both? Neither? But not redundant. I think! :-)

Be aware that if you don't understand every change then your contributions may not be welcome or helpful, depending on the project and situation.

It's like saying chisel made carpenter redundant. AI still needs an operator and then more people to actually make the output production ready.

People here are claiming that "AI" emits fully working products, so with that reading they are not just a tool.

Also, you would own a chisel and the chisel does not spy on you. The "AI" factories are owned by oligopolies and you have to pay a steep monthly fee in order to continue receiving your warez that are derivative works of actually creative people's IP. Also, the "AI" factories know everything you do and ask and what kind of code you write.

For now. Open Source AI continues to make progress

You are correct and I agree with you. HN monoculture of AI fanbois won't understand this

Of all the forums I frequent, hackernews is probably the most dismissive of AI, which I would not have guessed.

I think you're in the wrong thread. This isn't about AI emitting "fully working products", this is about AI brute-force figuring out how to compile stuff with gnarly constraints, a task which very few software developers look forward to.

Plus, as other commenters have pointed out already, you can run this stuff entirely free from risk of an AI company spying on what you are doing. The models that run locally got really good in the past 12 months, and if they don't work on your own machine you can rent a capable cloud GPU machine for a few bucks an hour.

There are also people telling you the earth is flat, and 30 years of experience can be compressed into a 4 minute you tube video. Even if a chisel could spy on me, it becomes dull with use, where as AI may become sharper with use, it still cannot distinguish which idiot is operating it. AI is just for people to learn prompting, which is an art, like google searching. It still cannot fathom "taste." or a large host of other types of nuances, that again, only come with experience and enculturation.

You are the master of understatement. I just spent 5+ Hours getting an emulator to just work. back and forth with the AI required me to be cognizant of the direction I was going, very cognizant. After It finally worked... the clean up was huge. at least 15 broken images, 100s of scratch files.

Unless you are selling a service to compile things for people I'm not sure who is being made redundant here.

Naturally, the primary source of purpose in life: Making Chocolate Doom compile.

If only philosophers of the last 2500 years had known this...

Precisely

I’ve always thought that most devs would be elated by the idea of automatio^n!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com