Making Games in Go: 3 Months Without LLMs vs. 3 Days with LLMs

Summary

IntroductionAfter 15 years as a software engineer, I realized I had never actually built and published a game.Since I grew up in 🇦🇷 Argentina playing card games with my friends, I figured I’d choose one of those. I asked myself:Truco: 3 Months Without LLMsOn June 18th of 2024 I started building Truco in my free time. As a longtime Go backend developer, the backend was obvious. The challenge was the UI and long-term hosting without a paid server.ProblemSolutionUIBit the bullet and learned the minimal required React for the UI.No serverTranspiled the server to WASM using TinyGo.HostingUsed GitHub Pages to host the static files.This was pre-LLM, so every detail had to be figured out by hand. It took about 3 months of trial and error to get it ready.I never planned to advertise or monetize it; I just wanted to finish, and maybe give someone the joy of playing their childhood game again. A year later, without any extra effort on my part, people are still playing it!In case you want to check it out, here are some links for it:Truco (play the game)Backend in GoFrontend in React (don’t judge me 🤷‍♂️ best I can do with 1-hour React knowledge)“Escoba”: 3 Days With LLMsA year later, visiting family in Argentina, I taught my nephew Escoba—the country’s second most popular card game (despite what ChatGPT insists).With LLMs now mainstream, I wondered how much faster building a game might be—so I decided to test it.I cloned the backend for Truco and gave Claude a long prompt explaining the rules of Escoba and asking it to refactor the code to implement it. To my surprise, it worked almost perfectly on the first prompt 😱. For a moment I thought: goodbye, job 😰.The only bug I found was that it used append incorrectly in one place and mutated actions. Except for that, I only added a few bells and whistles on top (like a better bot).The frontend was a different story; it took me a few days to get it right. The real challenge probably wasn’t just the LLM — it was my own React skills, c...