Over the last few months LLM's have reached a level where many developers (and almost everyone else) believes that these tools will (or have already) change the very nature of our work as developers. Specifically LLMs are increasingly able to do implementation work - that is the actual 'feet on the ground' coding for many tasks - so long as they are well guided architecturally and structurally.
Intent
The purpose of these blog posts is to establish (for myself) whether I believe the current LLM technology is capable of generating code at this level - specifically if it can write algorithm and source code to do some novel but well understood and well-defined tasks with the same guidance I would give a very junior developer with no real world experience.
Additionally I'd like to learn how best to use these tools personally; what they are strong at; what they are weak at and how I feel about the experience of using them this way.
The Task
This year I entered the JS13k games contest as I have done for many years -
My final entry can be found here and I was really happy with it (sorry about the colour scheme - the theme was 'unicorns and rainbows').
JS13kgames has some tough rules: your final source code must be under 13kb; no external loading of assets or code of any kind; must run mobile and desktop browsers; 30 days from start to final product.
This year I spent about 50 hours on the project over those 30 days and had spent some time before the contest started doing some research. Much of this time was is game design and software architecture - perhaps less than half spent on source development. I have demos from many different days in the project so I have a record (and git) of how fast it went and how it looked as the time progressed.
The game is nothing terribly new conceptually like most other platformers; the physics is a bit unusual but easy to explain; the graphics display is all constructed from text using the DOM; the level definitions are simple text strings; other than the player avatar there are only three other 'sprites' which are very simple.
So the big question is would a state of the art LLM have made my life easier if I got it to do the implementation?
Is a LLM capable of writing this code? Can it put together the code into a complex working game with levels and high scores? Can it write basic interpolation, animation, timing and utility services given that it is not allowed to use external libraries? Is it capable of handling terser and zip and managing the code size limit and how much of the burden around this tooling can it remove? How much debugging will I be left with?
The Plan
I've spent a few days researching the new tools (and am familiar with many of the tools) and have decided that cursor back by some token allocation seems to be the base setup most folk use for serious project work - I have that all set up.
My plan is to follow the same steps I took when doing the game jam. The design work is done; I know at least one way of solving every technical problem; I know what I want it to look like and how I want it to work. So it should go really quickly.
Starting with a few small (tiny html+code+css) proof of concept projects just to show I can make the technology work and my ideas for rendering the game are practical. I plan to do this phase in a fairly minimal project in cursor and learn to find my way around there first.
Then I will 'start' the contest - set up a serious project that will develop towards my complete game; build design and specification documents; rules sets for the unicorn; feature by feature requirements breakdowns.
From here I'll try to see if I can keep up with my last attempt - try to get similar demos and see how it goes. Ideally I would never have to touch the code directly but I will do some debugging or coding before I give up.
