On Vibe Coding Cont.

Last weekend I sat down again with Claude Code to work on my Conway's Game of Life inspired 3rd person shooter idea. Previously, the first time we worked on it, we made such rapid progress. But eventually we started hitting more and more walls. I was determined this time to clean up the code and fix the pesky multiplayer desync issues that cropped up specifically when a player respawned and chose a different Conway's Game of Life pattern.

I tried starting over from a commit just before I started using Claude Code on the project with the intention of more carefully vetting the generated code this time, as well as establishing systems for Claude to actually execute and test its GDScript (I use the Godot game engine) so it could catch its own compile-time errors instead of requiring me to be its eyes and hands when it came to actually hitting "Build" and testing the game. I also prompted Claude to move code into dedicated files, like "MultiplayerManager.gd" to keep things more organized.

But I eventually started to fear I wouldn't even be able to get Claude to make the same game it had made the first time and that there would be a ton of wasted effort trying to do so. Then I tried going back to the existing code again and cleaning that up, but I felt like to help Claude actually fix the bugs in the code and to prevent the same or other related bugs from cropping up again I really needed to actually understand the code. But at that point if felt like it would be easier, and hell, more fun to have just written the code myself than to try to understand the spaghetti I had with Claude.

I think the problem is that I'm trying to work with technology and systems I'm not super familiar with (GDScript and Godot), so it's hard to catch Claude when it goes off track until it's far into the weeds. If I were using it in a domain I'm more comfortable, say web development, I might have more success with coding agents / vibe coding. But right now I've been turned off it.

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EDIT 2025/07/04:

Last night I vibe coded to upgrade my website to use Vite and TypeScript. That ease of upgrading helps me understand what people mean when they say LLM agents will free us developers to do more interesting work. Claude Code took a likely annoying and fiddly task and made it much smoother so I could get to work on adding support for linking to specific articles on my blog.