In the past week I've fully revamped my drum game that I had initially written like 10 years ago.
The Revamp Story
Before:
After:
Did I use agent coding? Well, yes, I did!
I also used Gemini for some help improving the copy.
Actually I used this game project to try Claude Code again, since I had paid for an annual subscription which I was not using at all, after getting disenchanted with AI agent coding assistance.
Btw, I am sure I'm not the only person who have gone through a phase like this, and it might be not even my last one -- I might need a break from AI coding assistance in the future again. As a programmer who really enjoys to program, I am clearly mourning a certain loss of something, maybe the relevance of some abilities that I had worked hard to build, like typing fast, or generally using my creativity to write code.
Anyway, I had read some news about how agent coding had got much better over the past 6 months and saw some colleagues having some good successes with it, so I decided to give it another chance.
I'm glad I did, because I've got some good results with my game project, I managed to implement -- gosh, I feel ashamed of using the word implement when most of the code changes were done by the coding agent in "vibecoding" mode... anyway, I managed to get done several features that were sitting on a to-do list for years which I had never had the energy to implement previously.
It allowed me to greatly improve the game, and I have a bunch of ideas for what to do next.
Adding a level editor
One big enabler was adding a level editor, something that I wanted to do but wasn't sure exactly how to begin.
Until a few days ago, adding a level had to be done editing a JSON file. You know, okay for simple patterns, but not a good workflow to work with music. To be able to design better levels, I needed a way to be able to quickly preview a drum loop, make adjustments and check the result.
It took like 3 or 4 prompts to have a nice usable level editor that I could use right away. This alone already allowed me to make the game much better, with more interesting and musical drum patterns, and got me very excited.
The level editor looks like this:
Coding with AI
So yeah, I guess I am back to using AI for coding again.
I am worried of getting hooked to it and becoming "dumb", because there is clearly a big dopamine hit when things work, and it can get addictive.
For production work, I will need to be a lot more careful and disciplined than what I can get away with on a weekend project like my drum game. So, we'll see!
Usage limits
I did bump into the usage limits after like 40 prompts or so, that was a bit annoying. I didn't do anything special to optimize my token usage except compacting the conversations a few times.
Honestly, I don't feel like doing that -- using the lesser model would be less reliable, and I can live with the limit. It is a good reminder that these tools are expensive and energy-intensive, so it's a good thing to be mindful about how much I use it anyway, and maybe this way I won't rely on it too much. Working in bursts is fine by me.
Conclusion?
I am excited about the possibilities of creating more things!
At the same time, I'm mourning the value loss about manually written code and relevance of some of my hard-earned abilities. I am also worried about the cost of this kind of technology and the power that it gives to people that will use it for malicious purposes...
I hope that it will be used more for good than for evil!
I believe in the world there is just enough love to prevent hate from destroying everything, I hope it will continue to be the case!