Ross Wintle snuck out a great post late on Sunday – “Trust me: You don’t want to make little personal apps… especially not like that!“, and I had a quiet weekend with a couple of code projects that made Ross’ post resonate with me!
Problem solving in code
LLM’s I find are terrible at problem solving. They’re good at interpreting what people want to do, but it doesn’t really think about the box. I have an example I’ll probably talk on next week’s Now page, but will share it here.
I had a problem with some code in my game, in that I couldn’t get a hitbox (the yellow circle) to sit within the sprite. The problem was the rotation script I use pivots the sprite around the bottom right hand corner of the sprite, so whilst the hitbox remains in the correct place, the hitbox does not.
The LLM was rewriting my code, and getting nowhere fast. It was trying to change the pivot point but going nowhere. Confidently wrong as it hit the brick wall.
The solution? Don’t have a hitbox. Determine that a bullet is outside of the white circle, and if the colour of the pixel at the bullet’s x & y co-ordinate is not black, then determine a hit. This was applied and fixed.
Programming requires a different approach that is often found by taking a walk and thinking about the problem in a different way. There was a famous case with Wing Commander where a bug in some versions was a memory error that existed on the game exiting that caused a crash. The solution? Change the error message to “Thank you for playing Wing Commander!”. Problem solved.
I feel these sort of bugs at the moment can only really be fixed with experience.
Ongoing Support
The second thing Ross mentioned was ongoing support. This is true – I’ve noticed this with Revive to Sky. I pushed an update that ticked the plugin over to 10+ Active installations in WordPress this week. That has meant I get a few more support requests over the weekend. When these occur, it can take a bit of debugging. I curiously asked an LLM for a solution for one of these, surprise surprise they were wrong.
Of course, this can lead to a period of of debugging and a back and forth. That does take skill. You can use LLMs for this – asking what an error means. But often a search on the internet throws up a solution quicker and easier. That’s a skill.
Anyway, I just wanted to highlight Ross’ post and add my 2 cents. Make a brew (it’s Brew Monday!) and go and read it.