I primarily used Claude 4 sonnet for programing with assistance from Gemini 2.5 flash and GPT 4/5 to debug and compress as needed. I learned a ton about debugging with AI and the limitations of it. I feel like I have a much better understanding of what it can do and what it can't.
I have been very depressed over the last year or so due in large part to the US election. This summer I decided to take a break from a book I was working on to make a small game for myself. I know a little programing, but I have always struggled to stick with it. Always getting halfway through a project and getting stuck or distracted. This is the first project I've completed outside of work in years, and in large part was due to AI. I know some will hate this, but I do believe this will be how most of programs are made in the future. Programing languages made programing more accessible and easy, so has AI; and it is the worst it will ever be. We are still in the Basic years of AI.
I tried this before and was not successful. I got stuck earlier on and couldn't google my way out of it, and the AI couldn't debug itself. Now AI models have improved, but still suffer from this problem. After I completed most of this game, which took less than 8 hours (debugging took a week and a half with some scope creep). I tried to make another and failed. There are multiple issues, but mainly it comes down to a lack of control. If you have too large of a scope, the AI makes things up and it will be broken or bad. I got around this by taking smaller steps and being specific with what I wanted it to do, often focusing on one this at a time. How I got around the debugging issues was to use my brain to figure out what in the code was probably broken and ask the AI to review my code and tell it to change the behavior. Sometimes this doesn't work and the ai will get stuck. This is because it likely cannot do what you want it to do the way you want. You may have to look at the system or completely rebuild it. This happened when I was making the light logic. I realized the bugs I was running into were because I had the switch logic be different for every mode. I told the AI to remove the switch logic and rewrite with XOR logic, and that solve the bug I was having. Sometimes, however, the only solution is to revert to earlier codebases, and in the end I still had Gemini walking me through how to change level timers and cut tokens. I know AI is a hot topic right now, but I think this was a good learning opportunity and a great break. I now think of AI as an advance programing language, in other words its another, sometimes better way to interface with a computer. The ai still can't make you smarter, but you can ask it how you are dumb and it may grace you with the answer or feed you bs. A messed up 8 ball in that way sometimes.
If I move forward with this I'll be moving over to Godot to recreate this project and add more. More levels more features, more stuffs. All the art was done by me if it wasn't obvious enough though, lol. I'm happy I made this game, and I hope you like it too. Gotta go fast! Lights Off!
