jakegmaths

OP here.

I teach A-level CS in the UK. Students want to know if CS is still useful to study and whether they should still learn to code. I tried to create a large system to answer that question, by not writing any code myself and just using AI.

7 months later and it became a real company printing real photo books (https://www.rgbloom.com/). It's over 100kloc and the same again in tests. All I've manually coded was changing less than a dozen CSS values and tweaking one JavaScript string. But over 600 Claude Code sessions I've written over 6,700 prompts and roughly 250k words.

I've concluded that fewer and fewer projects need us humans to code them. But the more we know about CS fundamentals, and the more coding we've done and problems we've solved, the better the systems we can create with AI. I'd been coding for decades before this, and think that's the only reason it worked for me.

I expect many of you have found the same thing.

There's more technical details and some example prompts etc over at https://www.computingatschool.org.uk/forum-news-blogs/2026/o... - a post I wrote for UK computing teachers.

Happy to answer any questions!

I have a similar question: how do I stop Google photos asking me to update every time I open it?

"You're missing out

Update your Google photos app for the newest features"

... I have zero interest in updating. I'm not missing out on anything... other than being able to browse my photos without this annoying message getting in the way.

I'm building a photo book system that respects privacy via no tracking, not sending anything to the server until you go to print (all stored in indexeddb until then) and even then requires as few details as possible (eg email address optional), and no sign up at all. Then everything deleted within a month. It's at https://www.rgbloom.com/ and UK only for now.

Windows really needs to ditch CRLF and just use LF, and switch from backslashes to forward slashes. Or better yet, just switch everything to full POSIX.

In powershell everything is much better than cmd, but it's just not enough.

WSL is generally great, but there are annoying downsides. I often get "catastrophic" crashes and the zone identifier files drive me nuts. Plus it takes so much longer to start VSCode when connecting with WSL, and now you've got two file systems. WSL1 was in many ways better than WSL2 for these reasons.

Yeah I'm surprised I've no way to delete or edit my comment.

My apologies, this isn't the cause. Bun build doesn't suffer from this bug.

I think this is ultimately caused by a Bun bug which I reported, which means source maps are exposed in production: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/28001

Claude code uses (and Anthropic owns) Bun, so my guess is they're doing a production build, expecting it not to output source maps, but it is.

I find it infuriating when clickers say they send page up/down but actually send regular up/down key events.

I use URLs for pixel art: https://www.mathsuniverse.com/pixel-art?p=GgpUODLkg-N0JchwOF...

The latest version of Microsoft Teams is absolutely terrible at this... just one URL for everything. No way to bookmark even a particular team.

Bun is brilliant. I rarely have to install any packages, as Bun has just the right things built in, like SQL, S3 and now Redis too.

Almost all my computer science students are using Typst on my recommendation to write up their programming projects, vs most using Microsoft Word last year. Specifically, writing in VSCode with the Tinymist Typist extension. All going very well so far and no complaints.

I'm writing this on a Unihertz Jelly Star which is tiny, and I consider it my "protest phone" at the lack of decent small phones.

A friend jokingly calls it my "microphone", another a "prison phone" (due to its size allowing for more easily smuggling in body cavities). Occasionally I go to mobile phone shops and ask if they have a case for it just for the fun of seeing the look on their faces when they see it (I don't actually want a case, and in fact it came with one which I threw in the bin).

Personally, I couldn't be happier with it.

Only problems: they don't do software updates; camera is poor; non-OLED screen.

In an ideal world I'd have a slightly bigger phone, but not too much bigger. I've grown very fond of this phone.

Indeed. But sadly, they don't update them. The Unihertz Jelly Star is stuck on the June 2023 (yes... 2 years ago!) Android security update.

I'm struggling to see the problem with this statement, other than maybe to add in the word "usually". My students will know of graphs in maths where the origin is always bottom left. When working with HTML canvas and every other computer graphics situation I've worked in, it's top left instead.

I loved tixy when I first discovered it a few years ago so created this https://www.mathsuniverse.com/tixy (with permission from the original author) with puzzles to solve on the tixy grid. I use it with my computer science students who get really into it.

Your query for Java will include all instances of JavaScript as well, so you're over representing Java.

As a teacher of computer science, I'm working on various free resources for teachers and students, such as a guide to simulating forces and collisions in JavaScript (https://www.mathsuniverse.com/particles) and super simple real-time forms for lessons (https://www.mathsuniverse.com/forms). What brings me joy is seeing that they are actually useful for people other than just me.

I made a similar thing earlier this year at https://www.mathsuniverse.com/sorting that doesn't have music and focuses more on teaching students how different sorting algorithms work and how they compare to each other.

Bought for my son's birthday, just set it up. Very smooth. We're both delighted with it.

"Building experiences with real-time components was previously only accessible to multi-billion dollar companies"

... what a load of nonsense. I've built them in a few hours, spending £5 per month for a server.

Here's something similar I made yesterday. Just view source of the controlling page and the pop-up pages for how it works (single page with inline vanilla JavaScript and no npm install nonsense). Just uses postMessage(). https://cms-compsci.deno.dev/mrgordon/window/

It has experimental support as of this release: https://bun.sh/blog/bun-v1.0#bun-more-thing

I made a guided tutorial based around tixy: https://www.mathsuniverse.com/tixy

I love tixy.land, but as a school teacher of maths and computer science I think it may be a bit beyond most of my students. So with permission from Martin Kleppe, I created this guided tutorial to get to grips with the power of this simple 'creative code golfing'.

Note: the whole page is one <9kB request... I take pride in keeping bloat out of the web.