Vibe coding adventures

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

I have been playing around with the Antigravity Code Editor by Google under Windows. It offers the integration of various programming LLMs, including Gemini, Claude and GPT. I have been using Gemini Flash.

My prompt was actually quite simple: Create the classic game "Millionaire" from David Ahl in Python.

Nothing more, nothing less. The game is an old classic out of the book "More BASIC computer games" from 1979, so featuring finest spaghetti code. It's also nothing too fancy, basically a quite basic and randomized "this is your life" type of simulator, where you suffer some random events and have some choices until you die.

Anyway what the AI did is spooky: it used the archives available under More BASIC Computer Games: Page from More BASIC Computer Games and so on, made screenshots of the program and used this as one base for its work. To be able to do that it installed an extension in Google Chrome.

Then it matched these infos against some listing found on Github it claimed.

Anyway after about 10 minutes the AI was done with creating this, which actually works and is a quite faithful adaptation of the original. Which is quite something considering how small the original prompt was.

pastebin.com/c58EqEjS (Unfurl of Pastebin is not working, so just use copy&paste instead)

It also spits out this implementation plan:
Millionaire (David Ahl / Craig Gunnett) Python Port
This project involves porting the classic "Millionaire" life simulation game from David Ahl's More BASIC Computer Games (1979) to Python. The game simulates a person's life from birth to retirement, with the goal of becoming a millionaire through jobs, investments, and random life events.

Proposed Changes
[NEW] millionaire.py
A pure Python 3 implementation of the original game, preserving the original logic, text, and "fun" (including the random events like airplane crashes or bad breath).

Core Logic Implementation:

• Initialization: Set up player name, birth year (1980), starting location (Farm/Town), and initial funds based on parent's wealth.
• Main Loop: A loop representing the player's adult life (simulated as 13 major career/life steps).
• Career Management: Jobs like Teacher, Lawyer, Computer Programmer, etc., with associated salaries and expenses.
• Stock Market: A subsystem to buy/sell shares in fictional companies (IBM, USS, NCR, TWA) with fluctuating prices.
• Random Events: A table of 13+ random events (e.g., Las Vegas gambling, finding coins, getting sick, inheritance, raises/decreases, robot attacks, etc.).
• Scoring: Final assessment at death/retirement based on accumulated wealth ($1,000,000 = Millionaire).

Technical Details

• Input/Output: Standard
  
  print() and
  
  input().
• Randomness: Use random.uniform() or random.random() to mimic BASIC's RND(1).
• State Management: Using simple variables for money, year, age, and a dictionary or class for stock holdings.

Verification Plan
Manual Verification

• Run the game and verify the "Story" progression.
• Test different career paths (getting fired, raises).
• Test the stock market buying and selling.
• Verify the final score calculation.
• Ensure all text matches the spirit (and mostly the literal text) of the original game.