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.