fuzzyworld

My AI Use

I don't use generative AI. I don't create images, I don't ask AI to write poems or make videos. I ask AI yes-or-no questions about areas I understand very well, and I use AI to code.

I've been "agentic coding" (my current preference) since March of this year, when I "vibe coded" (parlance of the time) a web app that plays with cats: Cat Playground. The app was made by talking with ChatGPT and asking it to implement various changes. I started out explaining what I would do to create the app, and ChatGPT implemented it for me. It was an interesting experience and we quickly got a prototype up and working. ChatGPT made some curious choices, like butterflies that flapped the wrong way, but it did a wonderful job, as long as I was patient and willing to explain to it in verbose terms.

Some weekends, I'd wake up, consider working on a project, and actually dread needing to explain things to an AI. Those days, I picked up the PS5 controller and became a cowboy (RDR2). But on the "good" days, I was able to chat with an agent and it coded up a web app for me in a matter of hours.

Recent AI usage

I use Claude exclusively, and all of my coding is done by Opus 5.5. I pay 22$ a month for a basic subscription and have never paid for usage.

My most recent project (over vacation) was to develop a turn-based, rogue-like Bomberman clone, and I got that done before coming back to work. On Monday, October 26, I opened GitLab.com on my work computer, browsed to my repos, checked out the git history, was looking forward to sharing this game, when GitLab started giving me "rate limit exceeded" errors. Suddenly GitLab.com is erroring out. The GitLab Pages site is still working, so I can show off my app, but it would be nice to have the code and the readme with it. No such luck. Apparently GitLab recently started enforcing rather harsh limits on basic website users. Well, that was the end for me. I'm leaving GitLab.

I'm doing it by vibe coding a replacement that runs on my shared Dreamhost server. That's this website. This whole site is static and deploys from my laptop, and it holds the source code for all of my apps, and it hosts the web apps built from them. You can even look at the Markdown source of this page in a full IDE.

So, what are my views on AI? Skip generative AI and make the art yourself or out-source it to a human. Aside from that, AI is a microcosm of humanity (however it was created), and anything we get from that microcosm belongs to humanity. Everything that I make with AI is open-sourced and belongs to humanity.

And let me give you a very specific example of that: Tower.

Tower

I started writing an alien abduction story, and part of this story is a gigantic space station called Tower which looks like a can of Pringles floating in space. So, being who I am, of course vibe coded a web app that simulates the space station and allows me to fly around it. AI did the calculations to figure out the limits of the structure, the speed of the spin, the energy requirements, etc., and created a physically accurate simulation of something that until now just existed in my mind.

Screenshot of a web app showing a fictional mega-object

You can also fly around this fictional world, just click here!

And you can see the code for Tower the web app here: https://code.fuzzyworld.net/tower/

I vibe coded the web app that simulates a fictional world. That app belongs to everyone. But my words about this fictional world will cost a few bucks, hopefully. :)

Future Usage

I'm figuring out how to run my coding AIs locally, but it's a battle, and the current solutions are crap. One model switched to Spanish for some odd reason! But as soon as it's possible, I'm going to be using local coding models, and no other AI.

Intellectual Property

The microcosm of AI belongs to humankind. My way of interacting with that microcosm is my property. I don't want to share my methodology with the world, but I will share the fruits of my labor with the world.

At the end of October I found and fixed a Firefox bug. I am willing to share that transcript between me and Claude, because I don't feel like it has much of "me". It's a very straight-forward port of a similar Windows fix, I don't feel too attached to it, anyone who wants to learn from it, can.

My projects

Just a few of the projects I got into a reasonable shape with AI:

  1. engye - local file-sharing app with QR-code pairing. Share files locally without accounts.
  2. Nordic Skating - endless skate across thin black ice that pings. This was done by AI making tools to analyze a National Geographic video of a skater, and reading sea ice thickness research papers to figure out and confirm the physics of the acoustics of these frozen lakes.
  3. AdventOfCode coding harness - a harness that automatically pulls down the text and tests of a given AoC page and sets up my template. I had this setup for a while now, but it was hand-coded. I used AI to setup this standalone solution and I'm working on improving it to the point that it can be released.
  4. Tower - a 3D model of a fictional space station. I'm writing the story and using the simulation to look around my fictional world, seeing what sunrise looks like if we use 80 billion tiny mirrors to illuminate a tube with the surface area of Wisconsin.
  5. Explodorama - a turn-based, rogue-like Bomberman clone. We've got power-ups, charges, coins, hearts. We have demos of each single move, enemy, power-up, way to die, etc., all created on the fly and rendered on an old TV set. We've got automated simulation of games to compare various power-ups (teleportation is a game-changer, who knew?!), almost a thousand tests, automated screenshot creation. We warn real hard against player doing something stupid, but we still let you walk into fire. We use the CC0 Kenney.nl platformer pack for most art and sound design. We've got rockets, nukes, acid bombs that can cause a cave-in, decoys and proximity mines, even stores in between levels. Play it or modify it with your own art, your own rules, your own AI.
  6. Auto Print - I've got 3 finished manuscripts and a 4th half-way done, all of them are written in Markdown, and I vibe coded a simple way to create digital books from my manuscripts. I have the flexibility to write how I write, the AI-written conversion tool handles whatever you want to throw at it and produces PDF, DOCX, EPUB, and KPF files, so I can share my latest "masterpiece" with anyone in just a minute. The repo is designed to make it easy to produce ebooks from your markdown and it's open source.
  7. This site - I'm happy with the flexibility of this site and the ease with which I was able to remove my dependency on GitLab. Working on making all of this work open source and super-simple to use.