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Comment by dylanhouli | Hacker News Reader

Cool idea but as some others have said the website was running quite slow for me. I noticed it at first when hovering over the 'enter' button (so before even loading the pond) because the hover animation on the button kicked in really late feeling.

Then actually entering took a few seconds and it was quite laggy looking at all the fish.

Once those things are fixed I think the idea is neat. It would be cool to be able to interact with the pond in some way (click lily pads, drop food in the water, click the water to make it splash) but that might not be what you're going for with this

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Thank you for the feedback!

During my work on it I’ve been testing it on both my Linux box as well as my MacBook and haven’t encountered lag. I’m not meaning to say “it works on my machine” by this, but simply that I couldn’t have caught this before.

I will definitely address the lag issue, and find a more “graceful” way for koi to enter and leave the pond.

About interactivity – I was thinking about this both during the development as well as just when I had the idea and the intention was always to not have any, simply because in my own experience we are always doing “something”, and this was a way to get a little bit of the opposite – to do nothing.

But I can see how some micro-interactions could be useful. A sort of a “popping bubblewrap” action.

> I’m not meaning to say “it works on my machine” by this, but simply that I couldn’t have caught this before.

If you knew what you were doing you could have reasoned about what your code did, though. Such is the danger of trial-by-error vibe coding. I personally closed the tab because the audio kept cutting off arbitrarily after some minutes. Not to criticise you unduly because this was a cute concept, but I hope you might take away that LLMs are not only not perfect, but are also only "good enough" if your standards for "good enough" are particularly low, and use this as motivation to learn more in the future instead of always relying on them.

I think no interaction is good for an offline pond, but I do think some tiny little bit of interaction would be nice online since it adds a touch of humanity, being able to see other people and interact with them in some small way.

I think you are being too harsh. Even before AI, software and games would often work great on one computer and poor on other computers. I believe that isn't because they understood the programming less or their standards were low, but because there is so much variance between computer hardware, the firmware inside, and the software running on it that you can't guarantee software to run identically across many combinations.

Similarly it's not unusual for one website to behave differently across browsers.

Sure, to some extent. What I really took issue with is saying "I couldn't have caught this", which is a sort of learned helplessness. It's very often the case that, independent of inscrutable platform differences, LLMs just produce extremely shoddy code that obviously does not scale, and there is a whole class of problems you can solve before they become problems if you actually know how to program.

My intent was not to be harsh, though. I was trying to make a point that one can learn and do better. Coding is very much not solved.

I agree that couldn’t is a tad too far, you could always have tested more. But even with more testing you could’ve missed this, completely irrespective of the use of AI.

Hi, this might not be obvious to you so I wanted to explain it:

Testing on a single device, or two devices, is not enough. I'm on a laptop with 96 GB ram and a Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 370, and it's running at 3 FPS.

The crucial part is browser performance and network latency. You need to test across multiple browsers, but also evaluate frame times, CPU load, GPU load, etc. so you can make a reasonable estimate whether it's fast or not.

Then, when you realize that its not good enough, e.g. on firefox, you use firefox's profiler to see which parts are slow. LLMs would guess, probably, but you have to measure.

Welcome to software engineering.

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