My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

I'd like to see someone try to prove this. How many space invaders projects exist on the internet? I'd be hard to compare model "generated" code to everything out there looking for plagiarism, but I bet there are lots of snippets pulled in. These things are NOT smart, they are huge and articulate information repositories.

Based on my mental model of how these things work I'll be genuinely surprised if you can find even a few lines of code duplicated from one of those projects into the code that GLM-4.5 wrote for me.

  animation: glow 2s ease-in-out infinite;

      animation: glow .5s infinite alternate;

https://alvarotrigo.com/blog/animated-backgrounds-css/

Another page has examples and contains:

  animation: float 15s infinite ease-in-out;

That's what I expect these things to do: they break down Space Invaders into the components they need to build, then mix and match thousands of different coding patterns (like "animation: glow 2s ease-in-out infinite;") to implement different aspects of that game.

You can see that in the "reasoning" trace here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/9f515c8e32fb791549aeb88304550... - "I'll use a modern design with smooth animations, particle effects, and a retro-futuristic aesthetic."

Compressing a few petabytes into a few gigabytes requires that they can't be like this about all of the things they're accused of simply copy-pasting, from code to newspaper articles to novels. There's not enough space.

> find even a few lines of code duplicated from one of those projects

I'm pretty sure they meant multiple lines copied verbatim from a single project implementing space invaders, rather than individual lines copied (or likely just accidentally identical) across different unrelated projects.

> Write an HTML and JavaScript page implementing space invaders

It may not be "copy pasting" but it's generating output as best it can be recreated from its training on looking at Space Invaders source code.

The engineers at Taito that originally developed Space Invaders were not told "make Space Invaders" and then did their best to recall all the source code they've looked at in their life to re-type the source code to an existing game. From a logistics standpoint, where the source code already exists and is accessible, you may as well have copy-pasted it and fudged a few things around.

I used that prompt because it's the shortest possible prompt that tells the model to build a game with a specific set of features. If I wanted to build a custom game I would have had to write a prompt that was many paragraphs longer than that.

The aim of this piece isn't "OMG looks LLMs can build space invaders" - at this point that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. What's interesting is that my laptop can run a model that is capable of that now.

Sure but that doesn’t impact the OPs point at all because there are numerous copies of reverse engineered source code available.

There are numerous copies of the reverse engineered source code already translated to JavaScript in your models training set.

That code certainly looks similar, but I have trouble imagining how else you would implement very basic collision detection between a projectile and a player object in a game of this nature.

That's how you write css. The examples aren't the same at all, they just use the same css feature.

It feels like you aren't a coder--you've sabotaged your own point.

It's like using an LLM to implement a red black tree. Red black trees are in the training data, so you don't need to explain or describe what you mean beyond naming it.

"Real engineering" with LLMs usually requires a bunch of up front work creating specs and outlines and unit tests. "Context engineering"

I'm afraid no one cared much about your point :)

You'll only get "OMG look how good LLMs are they'll get us all fired!" comments and "LLMs suck" comments.

This is how it goes with religion...

More importantly, it is not just the collision check that is similar. Almost the entire sequence of operations is identical on a higher level:

    1. enemyBullet/player collision check
    2. same comment "// Player hit!" (this is how I found the code)
    3. remove enemy bullet from array
    4. decrement lives
    5. update lives UI
    6. (createParticle only exists in JS code)
    7. if lives are <= 0, gameOver

It doesn't really matter whether or not the original code was published. In fact that original source code on its own probably wouldn't be that useful, since I imagine it wouldn't have tipped the weights enough to be "recallable" from the model, not to mention it was tasked with implementing it in web technologies.