Thanks a lot, I think this is valid feedback and we will do that. About 1) we made assumption that for ranked challenges it would be obvious why it is vague, but we can fix it.
Hey, thanks for sharing this feedback. I am one of the creators of shader academy and I created this challenge. This is ranked challenge, so we do not provide answer and the score of it is used in our ranking
https://shaderacademy.com/ranking
For now we do not have other ranked challenges, but we will add more in future.
How would you improve description of this challenge? As you can notice, we provide a lot of hints, description etc. for other challenges, but this one is vague on purpose.
That's a good point, but I think very often people still have hard time creating effects they want. For example good few years ago I published few shaders on Unity Asset Store (like https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fragmentat...) and there were quite a lot of purchases (and still are sometimes).
My point is, you can create more complex effects and provide them as a tool/out of the box effect (wrapper)
I am also other author of shader academy. To clarify comments about ai, we use it sometimes to add comments in a code (people needed it to solve problems) or sometimes to generate some boilerplate code.
Do you think we should put these inspirations more on homepage?