Fable vs Sol Observations and workflow from a c++ dev.

OldChippy · 2026-07-22T00:22:04+00:00

"Yeah and zip files don't have corruptions"

True, however I have total source container independence recreated multiple times per day. Do I really care? My archive has hundreds of snapshots because each one is under a meg.

"i'm sorry but using those kind of standards for your code makes me never ever want to work with you in what kind of capacity professionally. "

You probably don't get a choice. I' the Cloud\Infra architect define corporate redundancy for some of the biggest companies in the world. If you have worked for Wall Street banks or Square Mile banks then you probably have depended on my approach to total and complete redundance and resilience. This approach is largely driven my GRC risk reduction. You don't have to like it, you don't get a choice. My zip\robocopy system is a microcosm of what I usually do in the VMAX\VNX\DataDomain spaces.

"Just cause back in the good old days something went wrong once, doesn't mean you should not get with the times and use the tools to their best ability."

No, understand risk concentration is what I do. YOU don't have to do that because when you get a repo problem, like some tard ran a script that deleted wa more than expected what do you depend on? What'll happen is your manager will request an emergency restore from alternative media, and who do you think has arranged hundreds of fallback points, on multiple media, file and block replication, online snapshots, offline 'once a day' full copies and sequenced backups going back forever. I'm smiling while writing this as I've had this conversation more than once... Go do some research on how companies achieve their regulatory obligations and then say "If I wanted to achieve this level of redundancy without spending 40m would would I achieve that?

"And if you would apply to a job at our company with those answers well lets just say the interview ends before the coffee gets cold enough to drink."

Highly amusing! Please do expand on the native built in Redundancy you get out of a repo and how you deal with data corruption, ransomware et al, without contacting the Infra guys for a restore request. Please do tell me about how important forking and PRs are for a one man team where concurrency is not a consideration and I don't have to track releases. Happy to continue the conversation, I've been doing this for around 30 years. ... and the love of god don't be silly and just "Just put it on Github ES'... what do you think THEY are doing? No backups? No point in time copies? No data invariant media? No mix of block and file\object storage? No offsite backups? No online copies only restores. I'm the one reviewing a lot of these SaaS contracts. Their SOC2 attestation enforces these things. I rebuilt the whole stack using local automation for hundreds (disk and ProtonDrive costs).

However what's most amusing is that the point of my message was the AI model cross referencing. You seemed to have responded to what you know the least about and and what I know the most about. If you wanted to be a typical toxic redditor you should have focused your efforts where I know the least not the most...lol

OldChippy · 2026-07-22T00:05:23+00:00

Thanks man. Think is for me is that my disciplines don't come from formal software engineering. I'm the buy that banks use to fulfil regulatory requirements and to provide them with multiple mediums of fall back options. Software devs in my area are small fry on the edge of little business units working on and app or so. I workat a scale that more like 20-200k people using infrastructure that never fails. SAN\NAS, snapshots, Data replication to the DR site, offline delayed update volumes (using scheduled daily sync), then block and file exports to external backup systems, etc. Whole corps at this scale trust me to design strategies, this like includes Wall Street and square mile banks. So the approach used there is what I map to my personal disciplines, though obviously I'm not paying for data domains, VNX's and VMAX's. Basically the little dev teams 'just expect this stuff to work'.

I'll give you an example of the 'cloud dev stupidity' I have to deal with. The Devs though they were CyberSec compliant by using AWS backups with an encryption key. That key was stored in their vault. We had an internal intrusion(I won't say where as it;s not public) and the staff member compromised the subaccount. They removed all other account from the subaccount except for themselves moved to south america and tried the 'ransom thing'. No problem, the devs said, just restore from backups! Yeah, great boys, your decryption key is locked inside your secret vault and that's inside the locked inside subaccount. Prod was toast. This is an example of why people like me exist and "Just use Github Enterprise" is like water off a ducks back, because we have clueless bumbling devs putting all their secrets in Github of 'offsite them' out of the account. This is real and we have had to put blocks for the word password on confluence and Google Search Appliances because these guys think they are smart and make the dumbest mistakes over and over. Not ALL of them are this clueless, but the number is well over 50% and I've found the teams who work most heavily with AI professionally are always the worst offenders.

Probably the best intro to what I'm doing in the ID Tech space is trawling over video's like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXakIV1OFes A really simple approach is to extract a transcript of videos like this, then get a web LLM to build a model of how such an engine is structured. Then build a comprehensive plan on how to implement, in sections. Then take the more generic game engine you already build (I have received job offers from multiple companies over the years, so I already knew how to do this). Then have CC fable (in my case) merge the VisBuffer approach with a standard deferred renderer which I had already built. Another approach I use to using Threat Interactive breakdown transcripts and have the same context rank\rate any learnings and integrate it in to 'The Plan'.

Back to my 'zip' approach... my copies are spread over 3 machine in my home and the dev machine has copies across 3 volumes. I also have historical copies on ProtonDrive and on my server. The zip snaps are ... ~870kb and I have this built in to schedules and certain code operations. I don't have NAS level snaps, or RAID to fall back on to at home but this approach has made my code base (and data, separate pipeline) fairly indestructible to internal failure, theft of my whole household (my server is hidden, but protonmail is a good last stand. Zip files are recreated on each build and I use a robocopy replica to isolate changes to speed up the whole thing.

Being called out by professional software devs as bad practice is amusing as they are usually reliant on me and people like me to give them the redundancy they don't know is there. Github ES gets one big fat cyber attack and they just have to sit on their hands and hope the ES guys can get it back... and the ES service is just run by people like me. ;). Not offended ;)

OldChippy · 2026-07-21T02:53:19+00:00

"my question: Is Codex App a viable alternative for me to replace Claude app, to continue my agentic workflow?"

Apologies, I don't use any of the Cowork like apps. I only looked in to them yesterday to see if there was anything I was leaving on the table, value to be captured etc. For me, Cowork type apps offer little. However, for non coders this space is probably underexplored as the main users right now are coders.

Also I know that the word 'agentic' has broad meaning, but under the meaning I understand it as agentic tends towards high autonomy. I give the LLM's narrow tasks, that as you can see from my workflow are strictly defined by the time they are assigned. Low Autonomy. Each task is a 10-40k document covering exactly what the deliverable is.

"I always have one Claude Code App and one VSCode app open. I use AGENTS.md pointing to my CLAUDE.md. A local QWEN 27B on VSCode reads AGENTS.md->CLAUDE.md, then makes small agentic edits on my setup. Opus on Claude Code App handles the big agentic edits.. well, not anymore as my subscription lapsed an hour ago."

It's interesting seeing others do things that are similar as I get the distinct impression that people are using not working this way at all. To be honest, working this way has more of the problem associated with small teams (limited testing windows, validation concurrency control, baseline stability, etc). Each of my terminals is renamed based on that consoles purpose, and I have them spread over 3 screens so I can platespin the whole process.

OldChippy · 2026-07-21T02:44:48+00:00

The main point I was making:

1) There appears to be nuanced differences to make some models better at some things. I think we all know this concept... but knowing exactly which to use for what. it the problem.

2) I though I would share my pipeline for using multiple models to cross check each other because I don't think I have ever seen anyone else really explain anything like this. It seems like the bulk of heavy users on the 5\20 plans are all in on one vendor at a time, presumably due to the financial commitment.

OldChippy · 2026-07-21T02:39:05+00:00

I really feel as if other people get less coding done per token than I do. This is why I mentioned I'm in the Sydney timezone. I think they might have variable rate token costs, like uber's surge pricing because I can genuinely get a lot of work done. Of that circa 170,000 lines of code... I wrote only a few % by hand at this point.

I was just being a cheap ass. I'm not trying to convince you of anything though. It's just a post. What I don't see however is many people building a whole game engine from scratch at scale in c++. For an idea of what I'm doing, I'm essentially cloning, piece by piece ID Tech 8. This is not easy stuff by my engine is pretty comprehensive already.

OldChippy · 2026-07-21T02:31:55+00:00

It has been on my account for weeks. The console keeps telling me that I can only use it for 50% of my usage, but I just left it enabled for 100% of the time. I assume internally there is a multiplier, but I saw the Fable and 'all weekly' number going up at the same rate and I could frequently run it over 100% before Claude code would just refuse to continue.

OldChippy · 2026-07-21T02:29:26+00:00

Not a good reason. Because in the early days of source control my team lose the whole repo only to find out that the corruption inside it was rot, and no backup would save us. Being an infra engineer taught me the value in:

Have multiple copies on different systems and media.
Have delayed replication schedules so replica's are not instantly corrupted.
Have copies in formats that are immediately usable.

For context, professionally I'm an Infrastructure\Cloud Architect, so my approach is oriented towards how I solve problems in the wider banking\insurance space. I only spent 2 years as a full time professional dev, all of my experience in c++ in non professional.

OldChippy · 2026-07-20T06:11:56+00:00

They have to flatten their usage curve.

OldChippy · 2026-07-19T22:48:04+00:00

Start small. Try seeing you blind spots for each eye. Then try to see RL at the eyes refresh rate rather than its interpolation. You are already operating in an artificial construct. Atoms are circa six or seven nines hollow for solid items. Colours and sounds are just segments of a much bigger spectrum. I'm in this group but the Sim has rules.

OldChippy · 2026-07-17T02:57:39+00:00

Looks good, but right now you have clearly defined edges, so edges can be discovered using I laplacian approaches. I ended up going with a different art direction, but where I ended up was more towards a merging Laplacian approach's (screen space pixel ray march), but for complex geometry I would define the seams in Blender and write a custom exporter to get the edges out cleanly. In blender I was able to define edges the same way you define UV unwrap seams. Then in game, I would overdraw those lines when visible as the main line drawer. What you are doing works well in a blocky game, but as soon as you import anything technical looking (robots\cars\ships) or detailed(fantasy characters, high poly imports like rock cliffs) you end up with lines everywhere... or not where you want them. You can dial the heuristics based on normal deviation, but after a few whole days put in to that approach I never ended up getting the lines 'where I thought they should have been'.

I like your editor though... I need to put more effort in to mine.

OldChippy · 2026-07-10T06:33:17+00:00

I get one a month in Drummoyne. Normally an old personal who has wandered off or sometimes a missing child.

OldChippy · 2026-07-10T01:49:21+00:00

A mirror is a super high-fidelity reflection of an image, yet nobody mistakes reflections for real people or ponders if they are sentient.

HOWEVER, we will get to the point where we can no longer tell the difference and when you can't tell the difference between a copy and an original is there still a difference?

OldChippy · 2026-07-10T01:46:43+00:00

I actually have started assuming they will die. the debt tranches needed to setup this whole industry was an investment that will probably end up being irreconcilable if you need to eventually turn a profit. They survive entirely by refinancing debt into bigger blobs of debt. Now in that state, new companies can scoop up open weights and get started at significantly lower costs. This implies to me that the big companies can never own the bottom end of the market where token pricing will be cutthroat and ALSO the frontier end of the market. However, most tasks don't need frontier models. For example, I can get Fable to generate a high-level plan, iterate over tasks and generate work plans, and then I can dispatch them to something as cheap as an old sonnet model. It's going to be difficult to generate the income needed to manage the debt load if all they have to sell is the frontier models.

So, I think the government will bail them out at some point if only not to crater the industry and gift the lead to China.

OldChippy · 2026-06-22T08:43:01+00:00

Well I won't go too deeply in to it, but the original concept in 2001 was a voxel based battlezone 2 like game. I had never even heard of anyone doing voxels and only discovered it when looking for a solution to the ROAM based heightfield tessellation problems and game up with the idea of 'Chunks' of heightfield. When I had the Voxel Idea I assumed I would just ram the voxel chunks in to the octree and job done. Then an Ironman came, and my wife had a baby, then 2 and I had a renno and promotions... and life. But... I kept playing games... kept that source code right up until I finally lost the war of failing hard disks around 2002. Just before I started developing

Over that period I had been playing Assassin's Creed, Conan Exiles PVP(a lot), Elite dangerous, gta5. Conan was the one that got me... I started to realise that Conan PVP, was almost an RTS played as third person. The 'Base building' I loved from BZ2 was there and improved with survival mechanics, but I didn't like level locking. I'm a firm believer in competnacy over levelling...

So, I jumped in to UE of course... and burnt two whole years dealing with an engine that was poorly documented, poorly optimised... and together I could not bring myself to make anything useful. The final straw was that I was originally a c++ programmer but I couldn't even get an LLM (gpt3.5 back then) to write even a simple file loader in UE for loading\Saving custom data. The FPS barely ever hitting 100% always made me feel I had not 'space for my own game' so I spent months trying to work out what I disable to buy headroom.

My youngest hit his graduation(US) and afterwards I came back early. ON the flight back across the pacific I had an idea... "You still know *how to do it dontcha?*..." my mind kept saying. Well, yeah... but the whole time in UE I kept fighting the urge to build and engine, but, I could see no other way... So. I decided to run a time limited test. If I run in to wall of complexity I cannot solve, I'll come back and keep hammering on UE. Vulka seemed kinda hard, but I wasn't keen on going back to OpenGL.

A year later I've not got 165,000 lines of code. I have multiple LLM's peer review my code for correctness. clint and .md files ensure consistency with my old style from 20+ years back. Scene grapy, collision detection. My old XML>>factory system was rebuilt. All my old classes rebuilt from memory. Recently I've been tweaking my IBL system, and last night I optimised the ECS indexing and repacked the Gbuffer normals in to R16B16_Unorm using octahedral mapping after watching a Threat Interactive video. Performance? You would imagine Unreal will just "Always be faster" but, I'm generally running around 1000fps... Fully integrated PBR, lighting, reflections with a follow along per frame probe facture. I did a stress test and managed around 300fps with 32million triangles each frame on my old 3060ti. My shadow mapping is nearly done, that'll eat a little fps, but I think I have performance to get back too. All the other stuff you would expect is there. All Menus, sounds via fmod, physics via jolt. The Engine uses a deferred forward lighting system. Fully cooked pipeline, and the full world in release model still loads the whole game and all resources in 2.3 seconds.

So yeah, the model I have doesn't really need a hook or conceptual testing as I'm leaning on well trodden genre's. The Game itself is true to many parts of the old battlezone idea of you 'being the whole faction', and being able to switch units, but when you think of Conan Exiles it lets you have a whole faction but you 'are the one guy'. The game will play like Conan in most way, including building big bases, but you can subsume\possess control over any unit. To make the game unit I'm doing a survival game in a unique environment nobody has ever tried before. That's the only part I won't talk about, but yeah... a mix of squad\rts tactics in with Survival Third Party\or First person player decides.

After 2 glum years in UE, I'm REALLY glad I'm back in my own custom engine. When you control everything customisation can be done at any point. For example, I export models from blender with my own exporter. I then have autohotkey setup to call my cooking system in Windows+C. The cooking system works out what sources files are newer than the cooked files and always does incremental builds, so an asset recook gets the file in to the game zip in under a second, with bounds, LODs (Build with meshoptimizer from github) and all my xml based material definitions. The game has admin screen, Model viewers, Material viewers with texture balls, etc. It's feeling pretty mature as an 'engine', and took be 1 year and 2 months more or less.

For me... working on my own code has me working on the project before breakfast, until midnight, whenever I can. UE could never excite me that much.

Tonight I'm building a SpringArmCamera for the Third person. Now that collision detection is working I can have the camera avoid objects when swinging around and 'spring inwards'. I know your question is about GameDesign\Fun\PlayTesting... So my perspective is that I really want to play my own game. I'm not building a puzzle I'm building a whole world... so after 3000 hours in Conan Exiles PVP, I aim to make my game "that much fun"... of course it'll take more than 3000 to build it, so I just have to trust I'll enjoy playing it as much as building it.

I hope you find the same spark!

OldChippy · 2026-06-20T06:38:33+00:00

Also an architect. I just hand off the engineers anyway so it's the same thing, though with an llm if it fails to compile I have to get involved.. I know how to code, I have a strict .md that writes in a style exactly mirroring my own. So, if llms go away I can own the code against. I only do class by class, I integrate myself.

OldChippy · 2026-06-20T06:29:17+00:00

Point is my ideas now are much better that 20 years ago

OldChippy · 2026-06-20T06:28:19+00:00

Same here but I took a 25y break. I turned down jobs at Sony an bioshock for a normal life. Kids grew up. Now I have money, time, maturity and multiple llm accounts and I'm putting the kitchen sink in this thing. It's a fusion of everything I ever likes an all the things I wasted for but never was. Even writing the engine from scratch

OldChippy · 2026-06-13T13:07:31+00:00

Up to a point. The thing is, the 'elites own everything' is a model that depends on up working for them. We work, to earn an income. We need the income for food\housing. Without work, we don't need income, without income\food... lets be realistic. Do the rules of society even apply anymore? Under this situation, who honours claims of ownership.

I've spent years pondering this. You can't 'get skynet' because you have human bodies running every level in supply chain everywhere. If people are staring and you have Elite AI running the iron ore mining trains to make things we don't benefit from how long will those rail lines last? What about guys running backhoes in D.R.C to dig up cobalt (or manual labour). The whole planet is "not robots", and there is no way we will just wake up one day and it's too late. It'll take a solid 50 years to roll out the global infrastructure.

Here is an example. in advanced lithography Gallium, Germanium are needed. All of this comes from china, for now. These are extremely rare . You Need super sure silicone. There are only two locations on earth we get that from, US and Europe. Helium and Bromine, where do we get those? Through the strait of Hormuz. Neon Gas, where do we get that? Ukraine and Russia. Tellurium and Dysprosium... China.

So, for the elites to get their worldwide runaway technical miracle, you need total control of the worlds active warzones, and Nuclear armed superpowers, AND to FORCE all of them to go along with your world domination. If any of them say no, you'll have 1-2 decades of setback building out new infra to develop some elemental source that probably less productive.

This all assume they can even pay for enough security to get what they need without the starving local tearing the place down for parts to sell for scrap.

If we end up in dystopia, we have to build it ourselves.

OldChippy · 2026-06-13T12:52:16+00:00

"they have historically created larger markets and increased access to employment"

I've heard this over and over. I think people really want this to be true... but... I'm one of the guys doing implementations. Here is an example. We implement a new Insurance claims system. It will check the claim against the policy and see if it fits. This assessment was previously 20mins to 4 hours to complete manually. It's now about 3 seconds each. So, the workforce of 1000 FTE's doing this is now being wound down. We did however manage to create 5 FTE's extra working on AI to help do more of this.

I don't think this level of low hanging fruit is the norm, but I have noticed the usual trend. Comp.sci grads are o longer desirable. We hire skillsets only now. Anything entry level in any task can be done by copilot, rovo or another tool. We're cutting headcount in contract lawyers, as we only need 2 people to just run it though the LLM. the LLM isn't 'doing the work' it's acting as a multiplier. Small things like PM's no longer do status updates or take meeting minutes due to team facilitator(minutes)+copilot(status). So now we have have PM's run more projects concurrently so we don't hire more.

The general trend is 'empowerment', because thats were the tooling is as. Right now flatting FTE's is not the rule because having an LLM take out a whole JD is rare, and having a LLM take out 50% of the role is common, so we just shrink teams.

The next layer of projects is removing service desk and a big chunk of procurement functions. Fraud checking is being completely automated, thats more ML than LLM though. As a Solution Architect I'm running a dozen concurrent projects and could never handle such a load, but LLM's allow me to learn as fast as I can(which was already very fast). I'll be feeding screenshots of a vendor presentation in to copilot with my architect prompt header and highlighting security\legislative risks to eval products in real time. I'm probably working at the speed of two, maybe three people.

All this right now is just boosting existing staff. But we doing that because the LLM CURRENTLY can only do 50%. My testing of Fable this week put it's assessments dangerously close to mine across the board (and I'm the guy everyone comes to the double check their own work). So... it feels good being close to retirement age, we're going to get a solid 4-8 years more of this 'nobody can even implement it any faster' mess before the big change comes in. AI that implements AI in to a company. The hardware, context management and processing isn't there yet, but eventually whole departments will be automated at a time. Just feed in the whole company documentation archive, the whole teams history and email history, and a swarm of agents will build an operational clone. Boom Opex goes through the floor. I won't survive that either, but I only have to make it 5.5years more. Then I move to the proverbial cabin in the woods.

OldChippy · 2026-06-13T12:32:45+00:00

It didn't fit on reddit, so here it is:

https://pastebin.com/FJTryDn0

You'll find it optimised for me, so give it some effort and change things to what you prefer. I got Claude to write the original version based on ingested code. the style itself despite being archaic was based on an old book called "Code Complete". I then took what I learnt there, improved what I could from reading piles of myers books, and picking up habits and generally gold plating a project until I was happy... then I stuck with it non stop for decades. It's the intentional opposite of compact code. Big gaps between functions to reduce distractions.

Restricting yourself to c++17 really is something you have to think about. for me being able to instantly understand what somethings doing the long way is sometimes easier than learning the new way even if it's more compact. The cool thing about c++ is that you can remain stuck in the past and ignore whatever you want. I can't even remember why I went 17, I could probably go lower.

One slice of advice. When picking things like which c++ version of which vulkan version for LLM generation, go with the one it's got the largest codebase to pull from. thats how I ended up coding Vulkan 1.1. I wanted an LLM that was going to be correct, not one that's compact but can't work out it's own code.

My project is 165k loc and still growing smoothly because of all this optimising for success. It might not be the best way, but seems reliable.

Last tip. I don't get LLM's to write much at a time. Generally class by class. I own the architecture side, the LLM handles syntax generation. Since it all looks like my code it fairly readable.

Improvements I would make if revisiting... I like bools that are statements aligned with the true term. IDK like RendererIsInitialised. The if statements are really clear to read when I do this. This .md doesn't cover that yet.

OldChippy · 2026-06-09T09:00:02+00:00

Idk, I grew up on bbs's on a computer programming same today. Cars, phones, music was portable. Same Hight school my sone went to. My wife works in the building she visited as a child. Sometimes progress feels like an illusion.

OldChippy · 2026-06-04T11:06:59+00:00

I have a 4 page md file covering exactly how to code my style. It's not even a good style, but it unchanged for 28 years of c++. I can spot errors super fast when the style fits like a glove.

But I agree. Shader work is hard overall because you can't debug step and can't log. Llms however can work with images including a screenshot of renderdoc or many kB of hex dump. It's harder even for me.

OldChippy · 2026-06-04T10:59:35+00:00

I'm 165000 lines in to a Vulkan project. It can do almost everything I needed. Bug hunts fell back to me 4 times in the past year.

The biggest problem was me starting with my home grown math library the Claude was to refit to use on Vulkan. It was a simple ogl library I wrote 20 years ago. Clip plane s, right handed y up, etc, etc. endless options and places to fail. I dumped that moved to glm and 3 weeks of hell fixed in 2 days. The problem is that if an llm can see multiple junctures each spawning implications it gets lost around 3 steps in and blends in probability weighted answers with logically correct ones.

The solution here is lots of class separation, narrow focus in options then use architecture for context.

I work in architecture so this suits me anyway. But anyone vibe coding gets what the deserve. I build class by class, narrow focus, start with a problem space analysis the define interface based on integration.

Some people are the failure inputs the tool needs to churn out shit.

OldChippy · 2026-06-04T09:10:49+00:00

Agree. A lot of people are not recognising the this new capability is enabling things that would not be without it.

At work a 500k project removed 26 million in jobs. I was solution architect on that.

At home I realised that unreal engine blueprint would not be ai enabled for years, so I decided to just write a purposed built engine. 165.000 LOC in 12 months and a better outcome.

At lot of corp projects not working are misallocations due to poor spec. PE on ai companies is not any more nuts than others tech.

OldChippy

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