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charlesfrisbee

10 karma · joined March 30, 2026

Building Simten, a Typescript-based HDL

https://simten.dev https://play.simten.dev

submissionscomments
charlesfrisbee··on Show HN: Build a CPU from gates, in TypeScript, in the browser
Thanks for sharing, will take a proper look later, but looks like you model latency which is something I wanted to include but couldn't think of a way that wouldn't take away from the simplicity of the model.

I agree code as source of truth is a must and GUI is not necessary for authoring, everything I built (Snake, Pong, the RISCV CPU) was done headlessly in node with the help of Claude working to a spec just using the @simten/core lib on npm.

I just built a readonly ui-layer on top with the hope of making it more accessible to students/learners starting out in the space, the main features being able to visually scrub between cycles and drill down into the internals of an abstracted component. I also have a Verilog import thing I've been working on to allow learners to visualise and poke around in the browser

charlesfrisbee··on Show HN: Build a CPU from gates, in TypeScript, in the browser
Interesting! Did you ever open source it? Would love to take a look. I wanted to have something that ran natively in the browser/node to have Logisim's ease of getting started/interactivity, while also being able to piggyback off Typescript's language features and the npm ecosystem.

I was also heavily inspired by the Steam game 'Turing Complete' but wanted something code based to not need to manually wire in the GUI. Thanks for taking a look

charlesfrisbee··on Ask HN: Do you offload your coding to AI, or keep your skills sharp?
I have the agent grill me/ask me questions about what has been implemented, often on a fairly technical/granular level of the feature is important enough.This is obviously way slower than just vibing the whole thing and ticking off a passing test suite (that the agent also wrote). But I find that doing this has allowed me to retain most of my problem solving and reasoning skills (which have definitely atrophied).

People are kidding themselves thinking they fully understand what is going on at a deep level for 3-4 (or more) parallel tasks constantly context switching. It's also an anxiety-inducing way to work and has led to a proliferation of agent management tools enabling max efficiency.

Focusing on systems thinking/observability/knowing when NOT to build something/using agents to fix/learn new things quickly seem to be where I see devs still bringing the most value compared to any other cowboy.

charlesfrisbee··on Show HN: Think Turing Complete, but you write the circuits in TypeScript (WIP)
Yea exactly. I made the campaign using the open source libs to try to get people using it creatively/in a somewhat familiar setting. Appreciate you having taken a look
charlesfrisbee··on Show HN: Think Turing Complete, but you write the circuits in TypeScript (WIP)
Good feedback. I tried a similar title on a previous post and got no traction so I tried to contextualise by relating it to Turing Complete. Didn't hit
charlesfrisbee··on Show HN: Think Turing Complete, but you write the circuits in TypeScript (WIP)
That's funny I genuinely could not think of another way to try an engage the people who play Turing Complete on Steam so I just gave this a whirl. In my head everyone on hn has played it but clearly not
charlesfrisbee··on Show HN: Think Turing Complete, but you write the circuits in TypeScript (WIP)
Ah yeah I guess the map page is not gated thanks for pointing that out