Last week I was all depressed about the dilemma of either keeping age-old code around by means of a “hack” or spending weeks, if not months, rewriting old parts of the game using a new framework. But as it’s often the case, the moment your write something down, gain a bit of distance and have a new go at it, things start to look a lot different.
In this particular case, I essentially got lead astray by AI: As one has to go with the times, I occasionally reach out to chat bots to help me research things I need in day-to-day coding…to varying success. As “AI” is merely a random text generator based on (a lot of) probabilities, it’s most useful in “common scenarios”. As soon as the amount of ingested data on a certain subject - or an unusual combination of subjects, as in my case - is low, things start to go awry. Turns out that the combination of “a technology common in the early 2000s” and “a modern application framework that had it’s latest major release in May of 2025” is not very common and the AI just made stuff up. Sadly, the output was also hard to verify because the regular search results and official documentation on the matter were slim as well. Properly reading the latter would have saved me a couple of days, though. While a bit hidden and not indexed in a way I would have (and obviously have) searched for, the required information was right there in the docs. Granted, with a few caveats. But “non-hacky” and quite official.
So that’s that…after my 4-day weekend I am now back to wrapping up this upgrade. Not going to make any promises as to whether I will actually be able to do that…after all, this unexpected project started in week 19 and I hallucinated a light at the end of the tunnel several times along the way. Seems like the AI and I have something in common 