veesahni

He originally released v1 of the game a few months ago and got great feedback from this community. A big thank you for the feedback, it led to some great conversations and provided a ton of motivation for him to keep moving forward.

v2 was built using HTML, JS, CSS. All written by hand in VSCode. No frameworks, no build steps. He made all the graphics himself and also recorded all the audio.

Note that both parents are programmers so he has lots of hints and guidance along the way. He also leverages Google Gemini to answer coding questions (syntax, how to do something, etc), but the LLM isn’t coding for him and it isn’t available to him directly in his editor.

For the blog post, we talked about the target audience and came up with an outline. He then dictated his blog post directly into Google Docs. Finally, we went through a few rounds of feedback/edits (for more clarity, more words, etc).

Back with v2! My 9 year old updated The Gamey Game based on your feedback armaansahni.com

4 veesahni 1 year ago 8 comments

Comment · 1 year ago

Reasoning models are a result of the learnings from CoT prompting.

Comment · 1 year ago

This is very close to what the ruby REPL will accept.

I tried to paste in the kitchen sink - it didn't like dangling decimals and the comment format, everything else worked as expected.

Comment · 1 year ago

Software is pretty cool from that perspective. Creative, intellectually stimulating & pays well. It helps that software powers everything now.

If he does choose to pursue this in the future, he'll have a strong start. There's still a question of what changes will come to the industry as a result of AI.

Appreciate the comments!

Comment · 1 year ago

Welll.......... before the game, he made this: https://www.armaansahni.com/pokemon/

Comment · 1 year ago

Kids dad here. There's no doubt he had a ton of guidance - both parents are experienced programmers. Many things needed explaining to a 9yo, the same things that would have needed explaining to any new developer.

We went through MANY iterations (test-play/code-review + feedback + dev) before it was released to the public, which meant there was a lot of discussions and lots of opportunities for him to correct many small issues.

Some thoughts:

* DOCTYPE & meta utf-8 - he learned from Khan academy

* meta viewport - I showed him how to test for mobile and pushed to make mobile a priority

* const/let/backticks - he uses prettier in VSCode, which does this automatically

* code modularization - as a result of discussions around maintainability

Comment · 1 year ago

I believe what he's created is remarkable for his age, and thus worth sharing. The way he used the LLM is very interesting, even to an adult audience.

The feedback received has been incredibly valuable. Not just for improving the game, but also for sparking conversations at home about game mechanics, color balance, coding standards, and even broader concepts like design and flow.

Ultimately, I'm showing him how we do things in the real world - build it, write about it, make sense of the feedback, and iterate.

Comment · 1 year ago

I posted on HN back then also

Comment · 1 year ago

Lol, he actually imagined some sort first-person 3d game, So yes, its entirely possible. We'll see where his interests take him.

Comment · 1 year ago

Improving clarity around charging is on his plan. Its a big issue with the current version.

I'll show him your feedback about the end-game. He was just excited to use document.write()'s side effect of blanking the page if it was the first use of the function. Partly he just wanted to do it because I told him we don't use that function anymore.

Appreciate the feedback!

veesahni

Recent submissions

Back with v2! My 9 year old updated The Gamey Game based on your feedback a armaansahni.com

Back with v2! My 9 year old updated The Gamey Game based on your feedback armaansahni.com