Very nice collection of toy projects, I resonate with you, I also wrote a ton of toy projects in sabbaticals, check the better ones out here : https://milgra.com/

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44284291 (117 points | 8 days ago | 28 comments)

Seems like the link changed, and thus not caught by the dupe detector.

Very good article, but am I the only one who is seeing that this guy got Mario 64 working (somewhat) on a GameBoy Advance? That's insane.

These time-to-complete estimates seem reallyyyyyy aggressive to me. I dunno maybe I'm just the slowest programmer in the world.

Agree and that's why I create https://github.com/ai-glimpse

Software is like baseball. Never stop practicing.

Everyone is caught up in focusing on LLMs instead of thinking about why smaller software is dramatically easier to write.

I'm always mixed on this. In the moment it can be fun. In the end when it inevitably feels useless, idk it feels bad. Like I spent a ton of time on something and get some knowledge out of it. It doesn't make my job better and I guess doesn't improve my situation much. My rust sub-directory feels like a digital closet of rpis collecting dust.

The things I find fun writing and learning about and the tools I use to do it are so disconnected from anything i do professionally.

Consider it like exercise. Pro atheletes train and exercise. Pro software developers should train and exercise their craft.

>Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. [...] But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this.

I agree. However: Your best bet is likely to build it by hand and then see if you can get an LLM to build it.

It is looking like we are living in a world where an important tool to have in your toolbox is going to be the skills and experience of working with the LLM/AI tooling. There are skills, knowledge, tools, tips and techniques that you need to develop to effectively use these tools, just like the honing you get from writing the code.

Over just the last half hour I did a brain dump of "hot tips" to a friend of mine who is just starting to use Claude Code to kick-start him.

The LLMs are REALLY good at writing small toy programs, and at the end of the day it's great to have little tools that you'll use every day.