I think the takeaway is that we have to think bigger, much bigger, now that AI coding is essentially "solved". Anyone can "write" an ARM simulator now, so that can't be the pinnacle of engineering. I'm thinking about buildings that couldn't be built (reasonably) by one person.
I'll give an example of what I'm working on. There's a model for segmenting organs from CT scans. There's another model for calculating radial diameters of blood vessels from CT scans. You can combine the two and approximate how much blood flow each organ gets based on its segmented volume and the sum total radial diameter of vessels feeding it. You can then render all of that in an app that shows perfusion to that organ.
The idea is to combine these models to extract every ounce of usable information from a CT scan that might be useful for procedural planning (I'm an interventional radiologist). While each algorithm would take weeks/months to implement, Opus 5.5 can do them in minutes to hours and then stitch them together. The results thus far have been better than anything I've seen.
monocasa 3 hours ago [-]
I was about to say that's a whole lot of gates for not a lot of computer, but then saw that rom and ram are also an array of nand gates.
hoten 1 hours ago [-]
First thing I tried was "double-click: fly to this latch". Didn't work. AI slop?
edit: press tab first.
guiambros 2 days ago [-]
This is pretty sad. Seeing this a couple of years ago would be mind blowing. An impressive technical feat by someone with grit and resilience to painstakingly build this from scratch.
Today? Meh.
LarsDu88 3 hours ago [-]
I had the exact same thought. I vibecoded a MOS6502 emulator a few months back in Rust. My Rust skill is weak, and I learned absolutely nothing about the 6502 or CPU design. Had I done it manually, there's also no way to prove I created it without LLM help making the whole exercise less appealing overall.
socializer 2 hours ago [-]
> there's also no way to prove I created it without LLM help
You don't need to prove it, that was never a requirement. You can simply say it. The only complication is that there's a fair number of people who, for some reason, really want to pass LLM output as their own. They are present on HN too. But here's another ancient trick to overcome that: reputation. Either the reputation you already have, or reputation you build over time. If you have a reputation as an honest person with genuine interest in software, you really don't have to worry, and you will have audience for your work.
Retr0id 2 hours ago [-]
I'm very grateful I have public pre-LLM projects I can point at (including a 6502 emulator!), and I have absolutely no idea how I'd go about bootstrapping the same kind of reputation starting from scratch.
LarsDu88 2 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately few of us have such reputation to truck with. I think the reality is there is no point in showing off manually coded work any more. All that stuff is really left for self-edification, and increasingly so as AI becomes more capable.
socializer 1 hours ago [-]
> I think the reality is there is no point in showing off manually coded work any more
What was the point before? To have fun, build a community, and to get attention of hiring managers. The first two reasons are still there. The third is more questionable, but there's still plenty of companies that hire based on what you know, not how well you prompt.
dmitrygr 38 minutes ago [-]
> Had I done it manually, there's also no way to prove I created it without LLM help
Of course there is -- ask you about it.
The coolest interview process i ever participated in (at MIT Lincoln Lab) was structured this way, and seems 100% LLM-proof. The interview was: give a talk about a cool/impressive technical thing you did for an hour and then answer questions from the interviewers about it for an hour. No way to succeed there without actually understanding.
Retr0id 2 hours ago [-]
Yup. I got excited for a bit, until I loaded the page and saw it was slop. I still would be impressed if someone actually took the time to learn about and implement it for themselves.
HarHarVeryFunny 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, and it seems they didn't even physically build it (which is most of the point of these retro projects), else where are the photos? So this is an emulation of a vibe coded processor. Couldn't they at least have added a three.js animation of bits flying around or something?!
Nurysso 2 hours ago [-]
OHH my god this is soo awesome, I wonder how people build such things.
Retr0id 2 hours ago [-]
They opened their AI agent and typed "make me a 16-bit computer built from NAND gates" and hit enter.
phoghed 2 hours ago [-]
Go ahead and paste that into your coding harness of choice and see if you get this out.
Retr0id 2 hours ago [-]
It'd take a few extra sentences to get the details, but I'm confident enough that it would work that I'd rather save my tokens for something more personally interesting.
phoghed 2 hours ago [-]
4 sentences huh? I think I’m going to remain a doubter.
ktm5j 37 minutes ago [-]
Sometimes people disagree, don't take it personally. You might be right and they're wrong, but even still you don't have to blow up about it. That's why you got flagged.
Retr0id 2 hours ago [-]
I'm sincerely curious, when was the last time you tried agentic coding?
phoghed 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
phoghed 45 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
socializer 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, the secret ingredient of these kinds of AI projects is being rich and spending an ungodly amount of money on it.
I kinda get it as a tech demo, but projects like this leave a bad taste in my mouth because I'm not sure what they're really supposed to accomplish for the author or the community. It's probably not something the person was genuinely interested in, it has no commercial or educational value, so it just... sucks the air out of a hobby? There are quite a few people who designed and built their own computers from discrete gates, and we're sharing this page instead.
btilly 2 hours ago [-]
It has long been known that you can build any gate from NAND gates.
So you can take an existing model of a computer, turn everything that isn't a NAND into a collection of NAND gates, then run software for the original computer.
moosedev 2 hours ago [-]
They don’t. Not any more.
wang_li 3 hours ago [-]
A nand gate takes 2 transistors. So 554,000 transistors if this were manufactured in a physical device.
By way of comparison, the Intel i386 had 275,000 transistors.
matja 3 hours ago [-]
Most of the gate budget here is on SRAM used for system memory and video memory, so not exactly comparable to a i386 which had neither on-die.
ohazi 3 hours ago [-]
4 transistors for a two-input NAND gate in CMOS.
jhallenworld 2 hours ago [-]
1 transistor for DTL... certainly CMOS is more relevant.
HarHarVeryFunny 2 hours ago [-]
ARM1 was only 25,000 transistors.
welcome_dragon 2 hours ago [-]
I mean if this was someone taking Nand2Tetris several steps further it would be impressive.
claude "create a NAND gate-based computer, giving it a crappy web page"
HarHarVeryFunny 5 minutes ago [-]
Why waste tokens building the computer when all you are going to show the user is the crappy web page? (the AI that created it may have had the same thought)
artemonster 2 hours ago [-]
Impressed by visuals working so smoothly on mobile
Rendered at 20:58:47 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I'll give an example of what I'm working on. There's a model for segmenting organs from CT scans. There's another model for calculating radial diameters of blood vessels from CT scans. You can combine the two and approximate how much blood flow each organ gets based on its segmented volume and the sum total radial diameter of vessels feeding it. You can then render all of that in an app that shows perfusion to that organ.
The idea is to combine these models to extract every ounce of usable information from a CT scan that might be useful for procedural planning (I'm an interventional radiologist). While each algorithm would take weeks/months to implement, Opus 5.5 can do them in minutes to hours and then stitch them together. The results thus far have been better than anything I've seen.
edit: press tab first.
Today? Meh.
You don't need to prove it, that was never a requirement. You can simply say it. The only complication is that there's a fair number of people who, for some reason, really want to pass LLM output as their own. They are present on HN too. But here's another ancient trick to overcome that: reputation. Either the reputation you already have, or reputation you build over time. If you have a reputation as an honest person with genuine interest in software, you really don't have to worry, and you will have audience for your work.
What was the point before? To have fun, build a community, and to get attention of hiring managers. The first two reasons are still there. The third is more questionable, but there's still plenty of companies that hire based on what you know, not how well you prompt.
Of course there is -- ask you about it.
The coolest interview process i ever participated in (at MIT Lincoln Lab) was structured this way, and seems 100% LLM-proof. The interview was: give a talk about a cool/impressive technical thing you did for an hour and then answer questions from the interviewers about it for an hour. No way to succeed there without actually understanding.
I kinda get it as a tech demo, but projects like this leave a bad taste in my mouth because I'm not sure what they're really supposed to accomplish for the author or the community. It's probably not something the person was genuinely interested in, it has no commercial or educational value, so it just... sucks the air out of a hobby? There are quite a few people who designed and built their own computers from discrete gates, and we're sharing this page instead.
So you can take an existing model of a computer, turn everything that isn't a NAND into a collection of NAND gates, then run software for the original computer.
By way of comparison, the Intel i386 had 275,000 transistors.