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

(simonwillison.net)
577 points simonw | 6 comments | 29 Jul 25 13:45 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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stpedgwdgfhgdd ◴[29 Jul 25 14:30 UTC] No.44723879[source]▶
Aside that space invaders from scratch is not representative for real engineering, it will be interesting to see what the business model for Anthropic will be if I can run a solid code generation model on my local machine (no usage tier per hour or week), let’s say, one year from now. At $200 per month for 2 years I can buy a decent Mx with 64GB (or perhaps even 128GB taking residual value into account)
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1. tptacek ◴[29 Jul 25 15:24 UTC] No.44724558[source]▶
OK, go write Space Invaders by hand.
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2. LandR ◴[29 Jul 25 17:02 UTC] No.44725778[source]▶
I'd hope most professional software engineers could do this in an afternoon or so?
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3. sejje ◴[29 Jul 25 17:12 UTC] No.44725890[source]▶
Most professional software engineers have never written a game and don't do web work, so I somehow doubt that.
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4. anthk ◴[29 Jul 25 17:53 UTC] No.44726363{3}[source]▶
With TCL/TK it's a matter of less than 2 hours.
5. Mashimo ◴[30 Jul 25 08:04 UTC] No.44731877[source]▶
Depends on the rules. Can I look up other space invaders games on github first? Can I use a game framework?

Just JS / HTML docs I probably could not.

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6. pharrington ◴[30 Jul 25 10:15 UTC] No.44732544{3}[source]▶
No preexisting framework.