I used to love posts like this. I even wrote my own basic runtime environment back in the day. But lately, because of AI, I've completely lost interest in this kind of stuff.
I don't say that lightly. I've been coding since I was 11 and loved every minute of it. I'm 52 now, and once I fully gave in to using AI, I pretty much stopped writing code myself.
Has anyone else felt like they've lost that spark?
At work, we are even not doing that much code anymore, what used to be microservices now are mcp tools, and it is basically orchestration across SaaS products, with low code, no code tools.
Thankfully at home I can do whatever I want, when I get some coding time available.
For me the spark is reinvigorated. I can try ideas before I didn’t have the time for, prototype and test and only pursue what proves to be worth the time.
>But lately, because of AI, I've completely lost interest in this kind of stuff.
I'm a few years older -and yes, I feel the same way. Not just in programming and geek stuff but in creativity too.
It seems literally pointless, since what everyone else is doing involves AI. It literally takes the point away since folks will simply say "oh, who cares? Look at this shit I made in AI instead"
Not really. Like you I also started coding in BASIC at an early age, though I'm 10 years behind you in "age" but probably 10 years ahead of you, only because I grew up in a 3rd-world country where we ourselves were behind the rest of the 1st/2nd nations
That being said however, no, i don't feel like I've lost the "spark" at all. Sure, I no longer care that much about the "writing of the code" itself, but you just end up shifting your focus to the creative side of thigns, content creating and driving.
That's still interesting. AI can't (yet?) replace this.
I am torn because on one hand now I have the superpowers to actually implement more complex projects, say a Gameboy emulator, on the other hand I lost the desire to do so because what's the point? As a consumer of software and blogs it is similar because a new BASIC for games just no longer is that interesting when I could vibe code it up myself. It's a bit schizophrenic, I guess ... for instance when you see the clearly formatted README files that's supposed to be a good thing and it certainly is but it is also a bit of a turn-off.
>because of AI, I've completely lost interest in this kind of stuff.
Where did the joy for doing it came from, before LLMs?
I mean, did people stop playing with LEGOs because we now have 3D printers?
Either you didn't really "enjoy" making stuff before, and were only doing it as a means to an end. Or you are just misguided for a bit, and will come back to it a while later..
Wrote a game, and played with Google Analytics, and a few others - I have to say how disapointed I was with google = used to be easy to use, now its just so frustrating and the stats make no sense to me.
Anyhow, whipped this up and I am actually benefitting from the stats - game changes, etc.
... Because I don't trust AI to work without structure. Which is also an excellent reason to avoid Python. Frankly, if AI is doing all the work, I'd rather skip past even rust and go to eg. https://kirancodes.me/posts/log-who-watches-the-watchers.htm... and have it work with formal verification.
I am capable of coding (25 years+) but just started playing with Claude Code, its actually pretty good. I have all the data in the DB (AI generated data)
I didn't find any way to get a compiler to generate a branchless version. I tried clang and GCC, both for amd64, with -O0, -O5, -Os, and for clang, -Oz.
There are cases where the optimization wouldn't be safe (like i < n && a[i] != k) but this is not one of them. Maybe the compiler is just dum. Or maybe avoiding branches is not clearly faster in cases like this? Have you measured this particular case?
This website eats newlines, unless you double them (one of the annoying features of markdown).
You can use codeblocks by putting 4 spaces before each line:
int main() {
// this should be properly formatted
return 0;
};
This is a MUD, which stands for "multiple user dungeon"; what's more useful is that it's based on a form of game called a "text adventure". Once upon a time back in the eighties these were some of the biggest sellers of the game industry! They would present a small world to explore, often a mostly-abandoned one because that's easier to do. You'd wander around, map the world (usually on paper, by hand! [1]), and discover creatures, characters, and items sitting around it, waiting for you to interact with them.
A lot of them were in the form of exploring some kind of dungeon; D&D was popular among nerds, and "what if the computer did all the record-keeping" was a popular thing to explore. Which explains why this is a "multiple-user dungeon" even if nothing in it is described as dank, underground rooms full of monsters and treasures.
Directions are given as compass directions because that's the very first text adventure did ("Colossal Caves"), and nobody ever found anything better - a few games tried forwards/left/right/back but it was very confusing to keep track of which way you were pointing.
In practice a lot of muds really ended up more like chat servers with a sense of place; instead of being in a "channel" with other people, you're in a "room", which might have a "bulletin board" on it for less-ephemeral discussions than the general chatter among players. There might be monsters to fight and puzzles to solve somewhere off in the map but nobody engaged with them. Instead they just hang out and chat, and roleplay.
I learned how to program in MUDs, made friends (including my first girlfriend, online dating was very different 35 years ago), and (mostly) had a great time. The death threats weren’t much fun, especially since he lived 2 hours from me.
I am curious about your “biggest sellers” comment. What was sold, and by whom?
MUDs were fun because, as a kid who read various magical fantasy series, there would inevitably be a server that was spun up attempting to recreate the world and magic system. Because it was just text, it made it far easier to do fan works like that. It's something kids today probably can't imagine. Really enjoy Twilight? You can join as server and make a character who's a [N]ormal Teenager, [W]erewolf boy, [C]enturies-old Sparkling Vampire. And you'd have a whole list of skills and progression for 100 levels. Wheel of Time had several different competing codebases with differing versions of channeling.
It was an entertaining way to learn C as a kid, and programming new weird spells made one feel like an actual wizard.
I think there's still some space for MUDs in the world. You could build a programming/literacy class around just teaching kids how to navigate and interact within that world, how to be a god/mod/admin within the world using its tools, and how to modify it and compile it with their desired changes.
My guess would be Zork and the other Infocom games which at the time were huge because they could be played on the very limited PC's of the 80's and were top 10 selling games. Myst is basically a graphical "text style" adventure that was huge in the 90's and drove lots of CD-ROM sales and was a top seller for like a decade.
I don't say that lightly. I've been coding since I was 11 and loved every minute of it. I'm 52 now, and once I fully gave in to using AI, I pretty much stopped writing code myself.
Has anyone else felt like they've lost that spark?