Oh, this is cute and a great first game! I'm working on my first game as well (a top-down 2D tower defense game).
What engine or framework did you end up going with? I looked into Unity, tried Godot for a few weeks, but landed on just making a Typescript-powered canvas game with PixiJS for graphics rendering. Found it much easier doing it this way instead of having to learn a game engine.
I agree with you on everything you said here except:
> when you know how the thing works and have that mental context, you will always be faster than an AI
That's just plain false, honestly. No one can type at the speed AI can code, even factoring in the time you need to spend to properly write out the spec & design rules the AI needs to follow when implementing your app/feature/whatever. And that gap will only increase as LLMs get more intelligent.
Oh yeah, I did a deep-dive into neural networks (both artificial and human) for vision processing, it's super dope stuff. The human vision processing system is remarkably similar to some of the AI stuff we've built for image processing!
> I like thinking, solving problems and typing out code myself.
I get this, I totally do, and I kind of hate relegating myself to doing "project manager" work instead of "software engineer" work, but the productivity gains make it no contest on whether to use AI here. Once I comprehensively validate the spec for a new feature, Codex just one-shots it basically every time. I'm talking thousands of lines of code in a single 3-hour session, with much of my time being spent browsing the internet while I wait for Codex to run in 15-20 minute sessions.
I'd estimate at least a 20x speedup in my ability to ship.
(and before you say it, yes, I review every single line of code before merging anything, so no - it's not AI slop)
I was wrong & you called me out on it, not rude, all good.
My first software job out of college was actually a QA Automation / SDET position, wrote an automated framework with Ruby + Selenium + Browserstack which did take screenshots of the app, but the app loaded dynamic content and there were frequent feature adjustments so no two screenshots were ever identical.
All other jobs I've had since then have been writing smart contracts for Ethereum apps - 100% backend, (I hate having to deal with frontend) so all our tests were just units & coverage & what have you.
I suppose if your environment holds constant and your features don't change frontend structure or behavior (eg refactors), then this is what you should expect.
Though, do note that this only works because my app is based on a tick/game-loop system without callbacks; if this was the standard game-development pattern of callbacks & message handling (especially w/ React / JS) to invoke events, it wouldn't work, because the timing would be slightly different each time, and an enemy would be a few pixels to the left/right of its position in the past run.
Huh! Well, I stand corrected. I've never seen that done (but I've only worked at startups with < 20 headcount for my entire software career so far, so that might be why).
No one that I've seen takes automated screenshots of webapps or games or what have you at pre-determined timestamps to make sure the app looks pixel-identical with every change.
(regardless of the method; the SHA'ing isn't the point here, the point is that it's a shortcut instead of "inspect the image for any regressions", since we don't need to inspect the image at all if it is identical)
Sure, it's been done before, and I'm sure not just limited to SGI, but no one does this for regular apps these days - never heard of it before. I just find it neat that Codex came up with this - not something I ever would have.
Edit: I'm not saying no one does checksums to compare files (lol). I'm saying no one takes screenshots at specific timestamps within an app or game's lifecycle and then compares them to ensure they're identical.
Edit 2: Whoops, looks like I'm wrong and this is apparently a pretty common thing (but not at the startups I've worked at, /shrug). I still think it's cool that Codex is doing it without being told to, though.
What engine or framework did you end up going with? I looked into Unity, tried Godot for a few weeks, but landed on just making a Typescript-powered canvas game with PixiJS for graphics rendering. Found it much easier doing it this way instead of having to learn a game engine.