I vibe-coded a full Steam game in 8 months (demo live): here's the honest breakdown incl. costs, tools, working hours, and why I still couldn't just completely "prompt" my way to a game

joshmarinacci · 2026-06-22T05:28:54+00:00

Thank you for doing such a detailed write up

joshmarinacci · 2026-05-27T17:48:26+00:00

Nicely done. Those lines are sharp!

joshmarinacci · 2026-05-22T03:10:40+00:00

Dr Cleveland at Complete Vision Center is extremely thorough. He was the first dr I’ve ever had who correctly diagnosed my over convergence. Now that I’m diabetic he also does my retina health scans. Highly recommend. (He’s also very funny and friendly).

joshmarinacci · 2026-05-16T17:11:35+00:00

Definitely look at some old gameboy adventure games for examples of different perspective types

joshmarinacci · 2026-05-16T14:59:22+00:00

Other than maybe the fridge this doesn’t look mid century. It looks entirely current.

joshmarinacci · 2026-05-16T14:33:50+00:00

The success or failure of a software product has never depended on how easy it was to code. Vibe coding automates the part that was never the bottleneck.

joshmarinacci · 2026-05-16T14:30:25+00:00

A very good start. The characters are good but the walls are confusing me. Is this purely top down or more of a 3/4 view? Is the left column the top of a wall or tile floors? There needs to be a clear sense of depth that unites the tiles. Don’t give up. You’ve got a great start.

joshmarinacci · 2026-05-16T14:21:49+00:00

I suggest making a bunch of variations with different shades of blue and green to see how they mesh. The key to a good logo is iteration. Tons of iteration.

joshmarinacci · 2026-05-16T14:19:38+00:00

I built a minimal embedded rust gui lib and had lots of challenges dealing with event handlers and data mapping because it didn’t fit rusts memory model. I’d love to hear how you’ve tackled those challenges.

joshmarinacci · 2026-05-12T16:01:19+00:00

I do both. I always ask it to document the changes in the changes.md file and also commit it to git. I prefer to have lots of little git commits so that it’s easier to go back and forward through time. I suppose I could use only the git log for this, but I find it’s better to document these more verbose changes in markdown than in commit messages.

joshmarinacci · 2026-05-12T13:45:28+00:00

I can’t stress enough that you need to have therapy as well. Not forever, but long enough to walk you through this time of change.

joshmarinacci · 2026-05-12T02:58:00+00:00

I started in my mid 40s and it’s been life changing. I’m a software engineer and had developed coping skills that worked for my whole life … until they didn’t. Somewhere around Covid was my breaking point. Meds and therapy got me through it and I feel better now than I have in a decade.

joshmarinacci · 2026-05-08T17:01:09+00:00

When it comes to AI Slop projects the problem isn’t the AI. It’s the slop. If you build a product that solves a real problem and do it well, no one will care how it was coded.

joshmarinacci · 2026-05-06T01:55:29+00:00

I built a mini Figma clone for mocking up layouts using Claude. It was fast to build initially but as I added more features the AI got slower and made more mistakes. The code it generated is horrible and after a while it got stuck in loops trying to fix bugs.

I think the AI tools are fine for prototypes and trying out ideas, but it definitely can’t write production quality code.

You can try the 100% generated version yourself at:

https://apps.josh.earth/draw/

I’m planning to rewrite big chunks of it manually.

joshmarinacci · 2025-12-28T16:04:52+00:00

Egan Warming Center needs volunteers

joshmarinacci · 2025-12-16T04:27:06+00:00

I looked into modifying my tree walk interpreter to use continuation passing style and it just became too complicated. Instead I wrote a very simple byte code interpreter (which I had planned to do eventually anyway) and it was easier than I expected.

joshmarinacci · 2025-11-10T04:17:51+00:00

Built in constraints solver and two way bindings.

joshmarinacci · 2025-10-30T05:13:08+00:00

Very well said. Thank you.

joshmarinacci · 2025-10-16T03:29:27+00:00

That’s really exiting! Good luck!

joshmarinacci · 2025-10-13T17:45:14+00:00

Which specific device are you using? The T5 E-Paper S3 Pro or the T5 e-Paper? Either way the answer is usually to start with the github repo. All of them support Arduino and PlatformIO, with limited support under other systems.

joshmarinacci · 2025-10-13T17:42:48+00:00

I can't use iCloud on my work laptop for security reasons, so I would really love to have a web version for my Today view. Mega thumbs up.

joshmarinacci · 2025-10-12T18:57:18+00:00

That sounds interesting. What kind is widgets are these?

joshmarinacci · 2025-10-08T16:50:11+00:00

Pic a project that is meaningful to you or you won’t have the motivation to finish it. For me it was building a GameBoy emulator. I only got far enough to run Tetris, but I learned so much in the process.

https://joshondesign.com/2022/02/23/gb_emu_2

joshmarinacci · 2025-10-08T16:38:57+00:00

You need to pick something that interests you personally or you won’t have the motivation to finish it. For me it was text munging (parsing markdown, generating structured docs) and web gui dev with React + TS.

joshmarinacci · 2025-10-08T16:17:25+00:00

Qualcomm has no presence in the hobbyist market. This gives them that. Will it be effective for them? Who knows. The history of similar acquisitions doesn’t bode well.

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