FPS.cob: A first person shooter in COBOL
github.com
github.com
https://github.com/icitry?tab=repositories
And he has a YouTube channel linked to his GitHub. Here's his video on the development of this project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o
Maybe AI was involved, maybe it wasn't. I don't know. But the author seems to know what he's doing, rather than someone just giving Claude a task and posting the result to GitHub. He talks through some of the challenges in building this, some of the different implementations he tried, the kinds of bugs and crashes he hit, and ultimately what worked and what didn't.
This is exactly the kind of stuff I love. Another comment said Claude has killed interest in crazy projects, but for me, as someone who likes to hand-craft some "why would you even think of that?" projects from time to time, discovering his repositories and YouTube has made my day.
Thanks for posting this, MBCook :)
I think the complaints in this thread are not in the spirit of HN. Let's do better.
It's quite interesting, and describes how the developer used COBOL to implement a raycasting algorithm and generate a stream of PPM images to to pipe into FFplay. There's zero evidence of this being written in Claude; there are multiple clips of the developer working in VSCode, where the Claude plugin doesn't even appear to be installed.
If someone wants to have fun in COBOL, let them have fun in COBOL.
If it’s agentic fun, that’s cool. If it’s an interest in the language, that’s cool. It’s not like you have to have an ROI for a fun side project.
One of the things I like about it is he had to create a little front end to display the game, mirroring actual COBOL practice. Until the 80s or so, COBOL didn't support meaningful terminal I/O in its own right; it was all batch. If you were a mainframe dev and wanted to do terminal interaction, you either had to write your own routines for that in mainframe assembly or use something like CICS, IBM's application server which provided its own terminal handling and transactional database routines accessible through a language extension which got swizzled into regular COBOL by a preprocessor. Creating a layer outside of COBOL to do the things COBOL was deficient in, and using COBOL's regular I/O to communicate with it, is peak mainframe-era engineering.
Other solutions to the same problem existed; there was one called InterComm, which lacked the preprocessor and required you to reserve a shared area of memory and write messages to InterComm directly into it. These days there's KICKS, an open source library API-compatible with CICS, aimed at the sort of person who faffs about with old software on Hercules.
I'm assuming it's the same Intercomm you're talking about.
Today, it's shallow, emptied out of the content.
It's not impressive that Claude wrote it, it was impressive if you have written it, OP.
Like OK someone vibecoded an FPS in COBOL or Pokémon emerald in a web browser with web assembly? Ok good for them, piss off karma farmer.
Sorry, but most of these discussions reek of extreme gatekeeping. First off, neither of these things are impossibly difficult and are easily doable with some dedication by hand. LLMs simply accelerate the process, the human still has to come up with the architecture, _idea_ and plan to do something like this.
Bonus points if it's ink on paper.
Bonus points if ink and paper are hand crafted by the creator rather than the filthy casuals that rely on paper mills to make their paper for them.
Because if you put them on balance that will be the truth.
If you have nothing else to comment on then can you stop crying please?
Could you stop evacuating your bladder and bowels? Puuuuhfleas
Adds absolutely nothing to the discussion.
- User X posts some very AI-ish comment: "It's not X --- it's Y, and the reason is important...blah blah"
- User Y responds, taking the original at face value, and disagreeing or otherwise putting time into parsing the ideas in User X's post.
- Me, thinking: User Y is being duped, wasting their time, arguing with a ghost, and otherwise being taken for a ride
That's not my problem, it's User Y's, and they may have knowingly decided to respond even though User X is posting AI slop.
But a forum where that happens a lot doesn't seem like a good place.
Do you have evidence that it's Claude written? Looking through the source it isn't clear to me, at all. Plus, even if it _was_ Claude/LLM assisted, why does that take away from the project?
An engineer vibe-coding a project generates an end product, yes, but what is there to be interested in or to discuss? Chances are said engineer isn't even capable of discussing the project in any depth. Are we going to be left discussing nothing but prompts and Claude workflows, and how we got the black box to do a thing? OK. Who cares? I guess we can all politely clap and move on.
I don't know if the posted project was written by an LLM or a human, but I have to agree with localhoster than AI has sucked a lot of the joy out of a lot of HN.
You can't call yourself an "engineer" if you just open Claude or Codex and hit "Y" on the keyboard to every prompt like that dipping flamingo when Homer Simpson took the wfh job (Simpsons predicted it).
And this is reductive to the point of absurdity.
Everybody screaming about AI forgets the fact... you STILL need the domain knowledge. That's where the value in engineering is now.
Imagine a wanna-be game designer thinking they can fire up codex or claude and even with a few weeks and a few hundred dollars in credit, coming out the other side with a game anybody would want to play.
That's not how it works.
I tried with godot. I can tell you everything you want to know about programming/networking/DevOps, and daily use that knowledge. But was very very quickly overwhelmed with the things I DON'T know about game design and development when I tried to develop retro-DQ clone in space.
And yeah, it didn't work.
It's like being offered a big mac at a fine dining restaurant. Yes, big mac is gonna taste fine, maybe you can dress it up nicely even. But the restaurant didn't make it, and you feel cheated for buying it (and in this case, wasting your time thinking someone coded it).
Something just existing isn't the same as something being made by someone with passion and effort beyond a one-shot prompt to Fable 5.
Pushing a button and having a machine turn those ingredients into a final product does eliminate its specialness.
Because it is process that matters, in such projects, not the outcome. E.g. it is fascinating how one manages to port and run Doom on some microwave led screen... But nobody is going to play it eventually, it is not relevant as the "end product".
But thanks for the accusation.
If there is a cool project that comes out the other side, who cares? I am forced to use Claude for day job, and while it's annoying, I am running at a pace that can keep up with my brain, not just what I can shit out and get tested and inevitably miss things. Because you know what's great?
When you have actual controls in place like Jira ticket integration, CI/CD steps that can be considered, but the overall change is small, how many more of those small changes do you think I can get done in a day versus before it? But hey, localhoster says it's shallow and empty of content, so it must be true.
A passion project of mine has been to develop a full decompilation and a randomizer for Neutopia. I've been working on this multiple years. I had it at a point where I had chests randomized, item grants, etc, but that kind of turned into a lame game because of how the existing Neupotia game works.
It's been stuck at 40% for just as long. I pointed codex at it, and now I'm at the at least 85-90% and will have it done within a few weeks.
Given Neutopia is a much smaller target audience, but when this project is released, it will at least as capable as http://alttpr.com/en, and more capable in some ways as random dungeon and overworld layouts are already possible, not just reusing layouts and changing chests.
Codex generated a big chunk of it, so it's clearly a horrible idea and piece of crap not worthy of localhoster here.
They've also written a couple dozen games in SQL over the years.
Accusing them of inexpertise with the tools is a gut reaction - but an unfair one in this case.
The creator has a YouTube Channel you can check out: https://www.youtube.com/@icitry/videos
But tcl 7.x and before was a pure string-based language. Everything was essentially a eval(). People would hit syntax errors on production code.
Fun, painful times.
The flip side: the interpreter is super simple and fun to write.
There are under-the-hood optimisations to make it less insanely slow but that only affects performance.
Tcl is a cool hack (the interpret is simple to write) but it's insane to actually use it. I wish the EDA industry would realise that.
> Tcl automatically manages these values so their type is transparent to the Tcl script writer.
Internally in the main Tcl implementation, it isn't just strings. It's a bit cleverer so it can be faster. But that is completely invisible to the Tcl programmer.
JavaScript is not just strings. It has real types (even if it is happy to coerce them to strings at the drop of a hat).
To put it another way, JavaScript has `typeof` which returns the type of an object. Tcl doesn't have that because the answer would always be "string".
The stupid engineers could write the code like the grunts they are, and then the manager could read it and verify that it was correct without having to know how a program.
That wasn’t exactly how it was put. And there are obviously some assumptions in they are on how good a job a manager who doesn’t know how to code could ever do.
Certainly an interesting idea though.
https://github.com/icitry/FPS.cob/blob/497867bb6827bcfc32d50...