My experience with atmospheric coding
I've always been interested in computers, so I've always been interested in programming. As a teenager I put together my website in HTML (yes, it was hosted on Geocity), and since then I've been dabbing in Python occasionally.
However, none of my projects have been far. Apart from the early website, I was of no use. All my efforts followed familiar patterns. I stick to certain resources, such as O'Reilly's books and online courses, and start with a big enthusiasm, but I give up as I find myself months or years away from creating something useful remotely.
Matt Smith/Foundry
That changed in late 2024 when my general frustration with WordPress I used on my personal website made me better. Appropriately, I threw that screenshot into Claude 3.5 Sonnet in addition to the content of my website and asked AI to replicate my site in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. To my surprise, Claude 3.5 produced a functional website. It wasn't perfect, but after working with Claude for a few hours, I was caught up in a website that I liked even more than its WordPress predecessor.
My approach was exactly what Karpathy explained. I hadn't read the code and didn't really try to understand it (I did (I have to think a bit about how Carousel works). That aside, I told Claude what to do, copy and paste the results of VSCode, saved the file, reloaded the browser to see what was changed. And it worked.
Matt Smith/Foundry
But what's the most important part? it was fun! Since then I've tried my hand with a few other coding projects. I created an online tool to track initiatives and created another tool to simplify the rolling dice when rolling dice when DMing a tabletop role-playing game Battletechand currently I'm playing a puzzle game for the Pico-8 virtual game console. We also used AI to guide the setup of tools that require a bit of fuss, like Openai's Whisper Speech-tostex model.
In particular, all three projects were in different programming languages: HTML/JavaScript, Python and Lua. I also dabbled in a few C#s. I started making puzzle games at Unity before deciding to swap it for a PICO-8 to suit my needs. I also made it a toy to convert the Tabletop RPG tool into a Windows app and decided it was useless.
