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Ask HN: What did you build this winter?

3 points by swalsh ↗ HN
I often take a vacation around December (my company has a use it or lose it policy) and use it to hack on personal projects. With the double limits on Claude Code, and Codex, I got A LOT more done than normal. I'm curious what people built the past few weeks.

3 comments

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shudv
you are right - december is a good time to disconnect from the daily chaos and do some focussed work.

I worked on this: https://github.com/shudv/deltasort

Its a more efficient way to incrementally repair sorted arrays. Feedback welcome!

What did you build?

ben_w
I finished off a browser-based modern take on Asteroids, and the game engine to support it. The music synthesiser is definitely still buggy, if I go back to this I'll replace "synthesise this MIDI file" with "loop a pre-rasterised sound file", but TBH it's almost certainly more sensible for my next project to just use an existing engine, this was originally just an experiment to see what GenAI could even do.

Everything else besides the music is basically as I'd like it to be: gameplay progression, achievements, particle effects, game controller support, collision detection, etc. The art assets are also AI-generated.

I also updated my Raspberry Pi webcam interface. It's now 30fps, not 4, and has an acceptable UI. Also made progress with some automated motion detection in there, but I have yet to test that, I won't speak for it actually working until I do.

Couple of other projects too, but now's not the time to reveal them. One might even turn into from project into product.