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Comment by varun_ch | Hacker News Reader

One interesting side effect of having a LLM write the thing including the README, is that the models tend to leave little hints of the authors intention or prompt as over-explained passages that make it obvious that AI help was used.

https://github.com/xsawyerx/curl-doom?tab=readme-ov-file#how...

eg. > A browser hitting the same URL gets a tiny landing page that just shows the one-liner

it’s subtle but once you notice it, it’s hard to miss.

As an aside, I feel like projects like this used to be really fun and impressive (I guess due to the fact that you’d think “Wow a human put their time into this wacky crazy thing”), whereas now you can have Claude consistently crap out something like this in 5 minutes, so it ruins the whole appeal to me…

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I think you're assuming a lot on how LLM was used here. I understand why you would, but it doesn't make it correct. You found me documenting how something works in the style that I do and you assume I just LLM'ed the entire thing.

Like I said, I understand why, but still...

Not to mention that the objectively bad practice of piping a curl call to bash is nowhere close to "playing doom via curl". It's almost as if they simply prompted "play doom with curl". In my experience, almost any overly-ambitious prompt ends similarly.

Oh wait I didn't even register that! yeah of course you can do anything in a terminal using curl if you're piping to bash!!!

But that's not what it does, the bash option just saves you from doing stty setup and reset I think? You can just type it all out by hand, too, as the readme explains

You know what, I stand corrected. I missed this portion of play.sh: https://github.com/xsawyerx/curl-doom/blob/ae1edb82e48efcd2d...

I'm not changing where I stand on piping to bash.

One form is to `curl` to get the bash code to just run the loop on keys that make additional curl requests. That is playing DOOM via curl. Each curl is a movement.

However, if you see the next form, it creates a single curl request that stays open and does not need bash or additional calls for each key. It uses the open request. (You do need to set the terminal to raw for this.)

HOWEVER, to push back against myself: It's relatively easy to do when other people did the heavy lifting: Doomgeneric, terminals, curl, etc. I also couldn't use websockets because it doesn't come with curl by default. And you can also move forward only when pressing a button to refresh the frame.

So yeah, not the most impressive thing by far. But it is curl used to play the game and that's... something?

You are correct, on all counts. (See my response to the other commenter.) I was more harsh than I should have been. You're correct that it's not the most advanced of DOOM implementations, but I'd hate to hinder DOOM-ifying things with pedantry. (So long as one isn't simply piping a DOOM binary to bash, of course.)

Is there any interest in 100% human-made malarkey like this still? I know the nonstop firehose of AI "art" has sharpened my interest in even the worst human-created art.

Constant struggle to get Claude to stop putting in little comments in the code that are only relevant to pointing out the thing it just changed, rather than actually helpful context for later.

I think it's safe to assume that "AI help was used" in everything these days and I don't understand why that should be a problem.

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