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Comment by Kuyawa | Hacker News Reader

I ported Prince of Persia to Swift for MacOS [1] over the weekend using DeepSeek Harness, spent three hours in total, $3 in tokens, and got a playable and enjoyable game bringing back good ol' memories

It is a faithful port of Jordan Mechner's 1989 original game and the guiding idea was just one sentence: port the game exactly, rewrite the engine completely

I didn't write a single line of code or test, not even the readme. I don't know if it delivered swift, assembly or brainfvck as directed but the result is spectacular and I would never had done it in ten lifetimes

Coding is solved, human programming is dead, apps will cost close to zero and those who don't see the writing on the wall are hopeless

[1] https://github.com/kuyawa/prince

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I'm trying to think of the number of projects that consisted of:

The work has already been done. Recreate this to be identical but just in a different programming language.

I'm going to say never.

This was literally the first coding job I ever got paid to do.

I would decompile the Google browser extension to extract the hash algorithm they used to sign page rank lookup requests, rewrite it in PHP and ship it to SEOs on weird forums.

They updated the hash every few months and I made enough money to pay for some summer activities as a teen.

Recreating the IBM PC bios, enabling clone PCs and changing the market completely?

One of the points the article makes is that copying is now essentially free. So if you spend money building something, someone else can copy it and use all the money they didn't spend marketing their version. And why license software anyway, when you can just clone it and even tweak it better towards your business cases? Will you be paying your Adobe subscription or buying the knockoff version of Photoshop?

So your argument is that cloning is such a low bar, that LLMs have solved coding by making innovation or new products not worth anyone's time?

That's not really what AI Boosters mean by "solving coding".

The article gives the timeframe at a decade or more. But I think it is safe to say that when it can happen, it will happen. IBM PC popular? Clone it and get in on the profits. Flappy Birds becomes popular? Hundreds of copies get released trying to get in on the money. Wordle? Even more. Article talks about moats to stop this and how changes in IP law enforcement are eroding them. We already have AI companies complaining about competitors stealing their efforts, unable to appreciate the irony on how the models were initially created and the precedents they set. Maybe the sinophobes will be right and Deepseek just a cheap knockoff of American AI, but will you care if the price is right?

Maybe you should try reading the readme it wrote you.

human programming sure is dead for translating content A to content B, this is the most appropriate use case for our current modelling of generative ai. translation is one field of many, did something in particular give you confidence that being good at translation implies universal applicability?

This is just an example related to the post itself about porting old games. AI exceeds all expectations. Personally I've been using AI for the last six months in many different scenarios and in all it just blows me away. The more I use it the less code I write

Do you have an example of what you think AI is not capable of in programming? I can give it a try

regarding translation I totally agree with you, ai excels at complex translative skills eg. art, reverse engineering. programming is another good example in isolation, like a web site or simple application. although, from my experience, excessive generative ai usage dulls the imagination, and distances programmers from their code (eg your admission to not knowing the readme of your project).

i do not have an answer for your question, I may only extend from it tangentially. can you think of a way that generative ai could be offered such that end users ultimately experience a greater (rather than lesser) capacity to understanding their programming output? the loss of this understanding is one of many reasons I don't like to use generative ai.

(Are you aware of SDLPoP? https://github.com/NagyD/SDLPoP )

Not me, AI was fully aware and used it as reference, the readme explains in detail how the original code, SDLPop and PrinceJS were used to build the fork and exactly in what measure

That raises the question of why do it anyway, and also diminishes the claim that it ported “the game” (either the abstract idea of it or the original closed-source implementation) and not those codebasese.

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