Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

I tried to build a simple static HTML game for the board game Just One, where you get a text box, type a word in, and it's shown full screen on the phone. There's a bug where, when you type, the text box jumps around, and none of the four LLMs I tried managed to fix it, no matter how much I prompted them. I don't know how you guys manage to one-shot entire games when I can't even stop a text box from jumping around the screen :(

> what works best with AI-coding: a strong and thorough idea of what you want, broken up into hundreds of smaller problems

A technique that works well for me is to get the AI to one-shot the basic functionality or gameplay, and then build on top of that with many iterations.

The one-shot should be immediately impressive, if not then ditch it and try again with an amended prompt until you get something good to build on.

This post was interesting to me because I also have a lot of programming experience but other than hunt the wumpus high school I haven’t programmed a game and recently started using AI to help with a new game.

AI has become three things for me:

(1) A learning tool. What it is really great at is understanding my questions when I don’t have the proper terminology. Because of this it can give me a starting point for answers. It is also really fantastic for exposing me to unknown unknowns; probably the most important thing it does for me.

(2) A tool to do boring or tedious things that I can do but slow me down. I’ve found it good enough at a variety of things like commenting code, writing a config file (that I usually edit), or other text-based adventures.

(3) Search. Just like (1), because it understands what I’m actually after, it is irrelevant if I know what a thing is actually called. I also let it filter things for me, make recommendations, etc.

I think you can let it think for you, but… why would you? It’s not as smart as you. It’s just faster and knows more things. It’s like an FPU for the CPU of your brain.

I commented on this before, I'm in this weird "opinion arbitrage" spot where I'm relatively skeptical by HN standards but I'm actually pushing for more usage at work. Hell, I'm typing this while I wait for Claude to be done.

The reason for my skepticism is the delta between what they're being sold as and what they actually do. All AI solutions, including agents (especially agents!), are effectively worse-than-worthless without guidance from someone experienced. There's very little that's "autonomous" about them, in fact.

The very guy who coined the term "vibe coding" went on stage effectively saying we're putting the carriage before the horse!

Omitting the important caveat that while they are fantastic tools they need to be restrained a lot is effectively lying.

> The difference is the specific leverage is 10x any other "10x" tool I've encountered so far. So, just like every tool, only more so.

One of the best comparisons to me is languages.

The old "lisp [or whatever] lets us do more, faster" idea, but with a fun twist where if you can reduce the code you write but still end up with generated code in a fast, high-performance language, without the extra work you would have to do to go add type annotations or whatnot everywhere for SBCL.

But with a gotcha that you are gonna have to do a lot of double-checking on some of the less-easily/obviously-verified parts of the generated code for certain type of work.

And of course highly-expressive languages have resulted in no small number of messy, unmaintainable codebases being built by people without well-specified advance plans. So we're gonna see a lot of those, still.

BUT to me the real, even bigger win - because I spend less time writing 100% new code than integrating old and new, or trying to improve old code/make it suit new purposes, is supercharged debugging. A debugger is a huge improvement over print statements everywhere for many types of things. A machine that you can copy-paste a block of code into, and say "the output looks like [this] instead of like [that], what's going on" and get a fresh set of eyes to quickly give you some generally-good suggestions is a huge improvement over the status quo for a lot of other things as well. Especially the type of things that are hard to attach a debugger to (sql, "infrastructure as code", build scripts, etc, just to start).

I've come to this same conclusion pretty strongly in the past few months in particular. I actually had negative comments on my experience with AI previously.

For all the talk of AI hitting a ceiling the latest tools have improved greatly. I'm literally doing things in hours that'd previously take weeks with little issue. I do of course have to think about the prompts and break it down to a fine grained level and i also have the AI integrated well with the IDE.

The biggest wins are the times you hit a new framework/library. Traditionally you'd go through the 'search for code samples on usage of new library/language/framework -> work those samples into a form that accomplishes your task' cycle. AI is much better for this to the extent it even often surprises me. "Oh the library has a more straightforward way to accomplish X than i thought!".

For those who are still skeptical it's time to try it again.

In addition, there is a learning curve and a skill ceiling that is deceptively higher than people think. Also, running Claude Opus in some tight agentic harness will give very different results than asking GPT-4o in the browser and copy/pasting stuff around.

> the leverage you get out of it is exponentially proportional to the quality of your instructions, the structure of your interactions, and the amount of attention you pay to the outputs

Couldn't say it better myself. I think many people get discouraged when they don't get good results without realizing that for good results you need to learn how to interact with these AI agents, it's a skill that you can improve by using them a lot. Also some AI tools are just better than others for certain use cases, you need to find one that works best with what you're doing.

When it finally clicks for you and you realize how much value you can extract from these tools there's literally no coming back.

> One thing I've noticed is many (most?) people in our cohort are very skeptical of AI coding (or simply aren't paying attention).

I'd hope most devs are using AI heavily when coding, the last 6 months seem to have reached a level of competence in raw programming skill somewhere around mid- or senior- level with hilarious variance between brilliance and idiocy.

I think you might be seeing the most vocal programmers are terrified for their future prospects and there isn't much room to reason with them so they're let alone.

I'd also like to hear about this—did OP use Augment Code in Cursor? How does that work/what exactly does that get you? Do you pay for both?

I've mentioned this in other replies, but I actually didn't pay for Claude directly, only via Cursor with their $20/mo subscription.

Thanks! The game actually supports gamepads too but I didn't have enough time to put in proper instructions for that.

Interesting, I actually had the turret destroy one of the enemies several time but it didn't prevent the tutorial message from showing up. I'll look into it though, thanks for the report!