What engine or framework did you end up going with? I looked into Unity, tried Godot for a few weeks, but landed on just making a Typescript-powered canvas game with PixiJS for graphics rendering. Found it much easier doing it this way instead of having to learn a game engine.

> when you know how the thing works and have that mental context, you will always be faster than an AI

That's just plain false, honestly. No one can type at the speed AI can code, even factoring in the time you need to spend to properly write out the spec & design rules the AI needs to follow when implementing your app/feature/whatever. And that gap will only increase as LLMs get more intelligent.

I get this, I totally do, and I kind of hate relegating myself to doing "project manager" work instead of "software engineer" work, but the productivity gains make it no contest on whether to use AI here. Once I comprehensively validate the spec for a new feature, Codex just one-shots it basically every time. I'm talking thousands of lines of code in a single 3-hour session, with much of my time being spent browsing the internet while I wait for Codex to run in 15-20 minute sessions.

I'd estimate at least a 20x speedup in my ability to ship.

(and before you say it, yes, I review every single line of code before merging anything, so no - it's not AI slop)

My first software job out of college was actually a QA Automation / SDET position, wrote an automated framework with Ruby + Selenium + Browserstack which did take screenshots of the app, but the app loaded dynamic content and there were frequent feature adjustments so no two screenshots were ever identical.

All other jobs I've had since then have been writing smart contracts for Ethereum apps - 100% backend, (I hate having to deal with frontend) so all our tests were just units & coverage & what have you.

I suppose if your environment holds constant and your features don't change frontend structure or behavior (eg refactors), then this is what you should expect.

Though, do note that this only works because my app is based on a tick/game-loop system without callbacks; if this was the standard game-development pattern of callbacks & message handling (especially w/ React / JS) to invoke events, it wouldn't work, because the timing would be slightly different each time, and an enemy would be a few pixels to the left/right of its position in the past run.

No one that I've seen takes automated screenshots of webapps or games or what have you at pre-determined timestamps to make sure the app looks pixel-identical with every change.

(regardless of the method; the SHA'ing isn't the point here, the point is that it's a shortcut instead of "inspect the image for any regressions", since we don't need to inspect the image at all if it is identical)

Edit: I'm not saying no one does checksums to compare files (lol). I'm saying no one takes screenshots at specific timestamps within an app or game's lifecycle and then compares them to ensure they're identical.

Edit 2: Whoops, looks like I'm wrong and this is apparently a pretty common thing (but not at the startups I've worked at, /shrug). I still think it's cool that Codex is doing it without being told to, though.

And then I see this in the ExecPlan for my latest refactor:

---

# Observations

- Observation: The refactor made the screenshots pixel-identical after the baseline was recaptured correctly.

Evidence: sha256sum screenshots/before-implementation-x.png screenshots/after-implementation-x.png reported matching hashes for before/after pairs 1, 2, and 3.

---

Which is crazy! I've never told Codex to do an sha compare on before/after screenshots of the app, but I do have instructions in my PLANS.md to take before & after screenshots of the webapp for the game to make sure we avoid frontend regressions (it uses GPT-Image-2 for analysis). So for non-frontend impacting changes, of course nothing should be different between screenshots taken at identical timestamps into the game start.

But doing an explicit SHA compare - that's just...not something I would've ever thought of. Wild.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48030302

Points: 5

# Comments: 13

No commentary? I'm in.

> What is the last business day of the month?

The last business day of the month is typically the last weekday of the month (excluding weekends). For example, the last business day of August 2020 would be Friday, August 28th.

> But August has 31 days, and August 31st, 2020 is a Monday.

In this case, the last business day of the month would be Friday, August 28th.

> Why not Monday, the 31st?

Monday, August 31st, 2020 is a public holiday in some countries, so it would not be considered a business day. Therefore, the last business day of the month would be the previous Friday, August 28th.