Pue-Tsuâ🌠

trivia: • started working on the game as a side project 4 days ago, landing ~1,150 PRs • every time i found an issue in the code i asked bot to make a lint rule against it • used TLA+ heavily to find bugs in the game's various state machines: the story, cutscenes, the game's systems. there are many formal verification skills, one for each major system • i put context into the filepaths: code that runs every frame or every tick gets a .hot.ts extension, and a lint rule bans allocating in it (no object literals, closures, new, etc.), so the game loop creates almost no garbage and GC doesn't cause stutters • game engine is mostly custom. three.js draws the 3D scene, but the simulation, post-processing and audio are all ours • the simulation is fully deterministic, so every run replays exactly from its inputs. when you post a high score, the server replays your whole run to check it isn't cheated • we generate dynamic og:images for every run based on your final stats, and it's all localized too! the game supports 10 languages • my favorite feature: the music seamlessly transitions into different music for the various biomes, continuing the previous melody • no audio files. all the music and sound effects are synthesized live in the browser by a custom Game Boy-style chip (two pulse voices, a wave voice, noise) plus a synthwave layer. the songs are written as text in code • all the pixel art is code. every sprite is a file drawn with one shared palette and packed into a sprite atlas at build time • it runs inside an X post, from the 245px card up to full screen. the bar is 60 fps with 500 enemies on a mid-range phone • the build fails if the first download goes over budget. it's about 124 KB gzipped right now • bots play the game headless to tune each difficulty against target survival rates • comments are banned by a lint rule. if code needs explaining, the fix is a better name or a test

codebases have always contained slop. we have always been okay with this because code rarely needs to be perfect, outside of mission critical "hard" (eg embedded) software. swe is a unique form of engineering because you're often building something that constantly evolves and is almost organic - user tastes change, your mental models evolve, and features come and go. admittedly, i and many others who've been coding for a long time were initially (like back in 2024) skeptical that agents would write production code. "but what about all the slop that would enter our beautiful codebase?". well, even before, we had human slop, and there was a lot of it! if we're being truthful, most people call "code i didn't write" slop. the reality is that 99% of people (i include myself in that number) don't even know what Good Code looks like, let alone be capable of writing it. i would propose that Good Code is: • correct • bug free • fast and cost efficient to run it has always been exceedingly difficult and expensive to write truly Good Code, because for the longest time (maybe @bendlang will change that), code was not something you could cheaply and formally guarantee to have all 3 of these properties. this is why writing hard software is much more difficult and expensive, because depending on the use case, you may only get one chance and so you have to be right from the start. but the vast majority of software we use does not need to be Good Code to provide value to users. in fact, it is very likely that most software we use is not formally verifiable! we accepted some bugs in exchange for velocity and progress, so we rely on tests and o11y instead and have adopted a more incremental approach. this is a good thing! agents help us move faster, and if you're open to the idea, are capable of helping us write better code. it won't be Good Code (that is still expensive), but it is likely to be much better on average at scale. the new craft of swe is to figure out how to do this. it's your job now! if your productivity with and without agents is not significantly different, you're doing something wrong. but it's not too late to embrace it and use it as an opportunity to learn a whole new skill tree