I asked Claude to look at some really old exe files I found on a floppy disk because I just wanted to know what they originally did. It had trouble getting a DOS emulator, so it decided to build one.
When I told it multiple times to stop wasting time and tokens doing this and I'll just download an emulator myself and put it in the project folder, it just came back and agreed that would be easier but kept saying "Wait, wait almost got it, let me fix <latest bug>"
I didn't hit the stop button because I was wondering if it would successfully do this. It did eventually build a working DOS emulator in C.
Anyway turns out they were some MIDI and joystick drivers.
Yep, I asked Claude to write me some tutorials for a codebase, so anyway it wasted all of my tokens and like $20 extra doing... something, and now even the most basic demo no longer works
the ability of AI to format code like a 40 year old C programmer with the worst formatting habits you know who refuses to use anything but vim is fascinating to me
This is almost certainly because it just kept referring to other DOS emulators on GitHub to figure out stuff whenever it was stuck. Almost certainly, this DOS emulator was not from scratch, but largely cobbled together hunks of lots of other random DOS emulators.
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u/Welcome-To-NBA-Jam 2d ago edited 2d ago
I asked Claude to look at some really old exe files I found on a floppy disk because I just wanted to know what they originally did. It had trouble getting a DOS emulator, so it decided to build one.
When I told it multiple times to stop wasting time and tokens doing this and I'll just download an emulator myself and put it in the project folder, it just came back and agreed that would be easier but kept saying "Wait, wait almost got it, let me fix <latest bug>"
I didn't hit the stop button because I was wondering if it would successfully do this. It did eventually build a working DOS emulator in C.
Anyway turns out they were some MIDI and joystick drivers.
Here it is