It takes a Mercator projection map and wraps it into a circle. It also has some fun (kinda) property sliders that let you control things like how big the circle in the middle is, and which part of the map is at the top, etc.
The only thing really interesting to me here is that I tried for about a day to get ChatGPT to do this in Xcode, in SwiftUI, and it couldn’t come close. And then I asked it to do it in Codea, and it hit it exactly on the first try.
So even ChatGPT likes Codea better!
*** did the max file size for sharing projects change?? It now says I can’t share anything over 4MB… didn’t it used to be 10MB??? @sim
Well first I tell it to act like an expert Codea programmer, which I guess you have to do.
Then I discuss the project I want to do, which helps me pin down some things I may not have thought out.
Then I tell it to write the project, which sometimes comes out surprisingly close to what I wanted, and sometimes nowhere close.
Then begins the real work which is walking ChatGPT through the changes I want one by one. I find it isn’t good at making a bunch of changes at once.
And also—this seems essential—any tab I want it to modify I paste the entire code for that tab into the end of my chat. If it doesn’t have the code to reference inside the most current prompt I find it will get little things wrong like making function calls with parameters that don’t exist, etc.
Other people may have better results but for me it’s about 50% easy and 50% leading by the hand.
That said, even as a merely kind of super advanced autocomplete, it writes code way faster than I could, and usually without errors, and even when it has errors it usually knows how to fix them right away, no bug hunting needed.
——and that said, it does not in general write good code. Its code can be messy and it can duplicate effort in different places and it can make things more complicated than they have to be. Trying to debug its code can reveal some dumb things. But from where I stand, it’s okay if it’s bad code, as long as it does what I want. I know some programmers will have steam coming out of their ears at that thought. But I like having my ideas become real much faster than I could do it myself.
