this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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I've been coding for a while. I did an honest eager attempt at making a real functioning thing with all code written by AI. A breakout clone using SDL2 with music.
The game should look good, play good, have cool effects, and be balanced. It should have an attractor screen, scoring, a win state and a lose state.
I also required the code to be maintainable. Meaning I should be able to look at every single line and understand it enough to defend its existence.
I did make it work. And honestly Claude did better than expected. The game ran well and was fun.
But: The process was shit.
I spent 2 days and several hundred dollars to babysit the AI, to get something I could have done in 1 day including learning SDL2.
Everything that turned out well, turned out well because I brought years of skill to the table, and could see when Claude was coding itself into a corner and tell it to break up code in modules, collate globals, remove duplication, pull out abstractions, etc. I had to detect all that and instruct on how to fix it. Until I did it was adding and re-adding bugs because it had made so much shittily structured code it was confusing itself.
TLDR; LLM can write maintainable code if given full constant attention by a skilled coder, at 40% of the coder's speed.
It would be really interesting to watch a video of this process. Though I'm certain it would be pretty difficult to pull off the editing.
You want to see someone using say, VS Code to write something using say, Claude Code?
There's probably a thousand videos of that.
More interesting: I watched someone who was super cheap trying to use multiple AIs to code a project because he kept running out of free credits. Every now and again he'd switch accounts and use up those free credits.
That was an amazing dance, let me tell ya! Glorious!
I asked him which one he'd pay for if he had unlimited money and he said Claude Code. He has the $20/month plan but only uses it in special situations because he'll run out of credits too fast. $20 really doesn't get you much with Anthropic 🤷
That inspired me to try out all the code assist AIs and their respective plugins/CLI tools. He's right: Claude Code was the best by a HUGE margin.
Gemini 3.0 is supposed to be nearly as good but I haven't tried it yet so I dunno.
Now that I've said all that: I am severely disappointed in this article because it doesn't say which AI models were used. In fact, the study authors don't even know what AI models were used. So it's 430 pull requests of random origin, made at some point in 2025.
For all we know, half of those could've been made with the Copilot gpt5-mini that everyone gets for free when they install the Copilot extension in VS Code.
It's more I want to see the process of experienced coders explaining the coding mistakes that typical AI coding makes. I have very little experience and see it as a good learning experience. You're probably right about there being tons of videos like that.
The mistakes it makes depends on the model and the language. GPT5 models can make horrific mistakes though where it randomly removes huge swaths of code for no reason. Every time it happens I'm like, "what the actual fuck?" Undoing the last change and trying usually fixes it though 🤷
They all make horrific security mistakes quite often. Though, that's probably because they're trained on human code that is *also" chock full of security mistakes (former security consultant, so I'm super biased on that front haha).
Oh, gpt def does that’s lol.
Even replaces large bits with just a …
But I don’t use it to rewrite code. I use projects to load everything into it and just ask for pieces that I’ll edit and insert. There’s something about it that works with my adhd in keeping track. It works well for me.