Holy Shit, AI is actually good now

02/23/2026

I mean good as in, it can create code that actually works. Obviously not without some caveats, but as someone who was staunchly anti-AI usage, I've been surprised by the state of (good) LLM models now.

Basically, I had always been like, "AI is bad, companies destroy the environment and waste so much money and resources on word vomit generators that don't work!!! I use AIs to test things out and they're garbage, what the freak?? Idk how people are spending money on this and buying the hype"

And then I remembered that my uni gives us students access to a multitude of different LLM models through a web interface.

The First Test: Pygame Pip-Boy

Around this time, I was getting really into Fallout, and wanted to make my own Pip-Boy. I searched for some existing code and tutorials and found a repo that seemed like it would be a good base for making my own design. After mucking around in the repo, getting a feel for things, I remembered the AI thing, and basically said, "ah what the heck, lets try this out."

So I put the code in (using claude-4-sonnet-thinking) and it actually started doing what I asked. And the code worked! I could feel my jaw hit the floor. Suddenly paying for this made sense.

Some things to note in my test:

I did occasionally end up in the weeds, but I *did* find out that my laptop has no GPS, so even though I changed my mind about the mess of GPS code and reverted that commit before just having Claude do a click-and-drag thing, I'd still say it was useful.

The radio functions was most impressive because the iteration and tweaking was really effective, it plays music, remembers position, everything.

I first tasked it to do a small thing, adding a second column to show more info on the different screens for my custom status page. Which worked nice, but then later I had an issue with the Vault Boy background showing up in other screens cause of the way it overlaid the images and such, but I uploaded a screenshot, said "hey the image is overlaid on modules that it shouldn't" and it fixed it. I have no idea if it looked at the image, but if it did that's pretty neat.

The code is here: https://codeberg.org/JetpackJackson/mypipboy

The Second Test: Desktop Birdipedia

I had wanted to make a desktop version of my Android Birdipedia app for a while, since Google is enshittifying Android at an increased rate. I want a Linux phone, and I want my app to work on Linux without Waydroid. I had started to hand write my own thing in Zig and Qt6 but kinda trickled off when I got busy.

So I fired up Claude, asked it to do it in Python and Qt6, and for a first try, it did pretty well!

It did initially make up bird data, so I had to iterate and provide samples of the different files that I got my data from, cause the full files were too big for the context window. Which is fair. This is my own inexperience at play. Despite wanting nice clear instructions when told to do something, I'm not the best at returning the same courtesy, because I forget to provide context that is obvious to me since its in my brain and I'm thinking about it, but I haven't actually mentioned it anywhere.

It also *hammered* eBird with fetching images so we got rate limited (my mistake, I actually didn't think the code would work! Sorry eBird.), and it also didn't cache them on disk, but after I told it that, it fixed it. I additionally stressed the need to lazy load the birds as the user scrolled.

Theming was interesting, I tried to have it do a dark mode but it did its own css/palette, but I feel like there should be a way to have a PySide6 thing use the system dark mode settings/scheme. I've never used PySide6 so idk. I did have to look up why it wasn't finding the Breeze theme but StackOverflow did that fine. For now I reverted the dark mode setting and just had it be able to change the main Qt theme.

The code is here: https://codeberg.org/JetpackJackson/pybirdipedia

Overall Thoughts

I'm really conflicted. On one hand, Claude got two projects in a working state faster than I had even tried to do one. On the other, something does get lost and I'm not sure how I feel about it. But also, I now have the two programs I wanted, and I had fun. It feels so strange and I'm still working out my feelings on all of this, because it changes the whole landscape.