I think the takeaway is that we have to think bigger, much bigger, now that AI coding is essentially "solved". Anyone can "write" an ARM simulator now, so that can't be the pinnacle of engineering. I'm thinking about buildings that couldn't be built (reasonably) by one person.
I'll give an example of what I'm working on. There's a model for segmenting organs from CT scans. There's another model for calculating radial diameters of blood vessels from CT scans. You can combine the two and approximate how much blood flow each organ gets based on its segmented volume and the sum total radial diameter of vessels feeding it. You can then render all of that in an app that shows perfusion to that organ.
The idea is to combine these models to extract every ounce of usable information from a CT scan that might be useful for procedural planning (I'm an interventional radiologist). While each algorithm would take weeks/months to implement, Opus 5.5 can do them in minutes to hours and then stitch them together. The results thus far have been better than anything I've seen.
Sorry to be pedantic but...every "boolean" logic gate can be made out of NAND gates pretty trivially (XOR too for that matter). So you just have to design a computer from logic gates and then decompose each one into NANDs.
"I made a computer out of n logic gates" doesn't sound as cool I guess?
Granted I am criticizing the concept and post title, not the execution.
I don’t have any familiarity with what’s considered the state of the art here, but I was wondering if the number of nand gates used is significant? So maybe this is neat because it uses less than was though possible?
Edit: looks like from reading some additional comments here that this isn’t particularly novel in that regard though…
This is pretty sad. Seeing this a couple of years ago would be mind blowing. An impressive technical feat by someone with grit and resilience to painstakingly build this from scratch.
I've build a similar project in university in two weeks with lisp, spending 30 minutes before bed on it. The difference being that it started with analogue voltages in the transistors.
I'm starting to think people impressed by LLMs are for the first time in their life not using a hammer on fastening screws and deeply impressed by tools that font fight them every step of the way.
I had the exact same thought. I vibecoded a MOS6502 emulator a few months back in Rust. My Rust skill is weak, and I learned absolutely nothing about the 6502 or CPU design. Had I done it manually, there's also no way to prove I created it without LLM help making the whole exercise less appealing overall.
> there's also no way to prove I created it without LLM help
You don't need to prove it, that was never a requirement. You can simply say it. The only complication is that there's a fair number of people who, for some reason, really want to pass LLM output as their own. They are present on HN too. But here's another ancient trick to overcome that: reputation. Either the reputation you already have, or reputation you build over time. If you have a reputation as an honest person with genuine interest in software, you really don't have to worry, and you will have audience for your work.
I'm very grateful I have public pre-LLM projects I can point at (including a 6502 emulator!), and I have absolutely no idea how I'd go about bootstrapping the same kind of reputation starting from scratch.
Unfortunately few of us have such reputation to truck with. I think the reality is there is no point in showing off manually coded work any more. All that stuff is really left for self-edification, and increasingly so as AI becomes more capable.
> I think the reality is there is no point in showing off manually coded work any more
What was the point before? To have fun, build a community, and to get attention of hiring managers. The first two reasons are still there. The third is more questionable, but there's still plenty of companies that hire based on what you know, not how well you prompt.
Agreed. In the pre-LLM days, students always asked me how to "maximize" their hirability. The standard response was "have a passion project" and yeah, that did help people get hired in some ways. But the project was almost never the point of the demonstration. It was more to show that you are _the kind of person_ who sweats the details, who likes taking deep dives. For many of the best jobs, that's _still_ what they want; it's just now, a Github repository is no longer sufficient. That should not stop a passionate person from pursuing their passions.
LLM output should be credited to whoever prompted it. I don't get this hysteria. Llms are tools like compilers or chain saws. We don't say a cabinet made from milled wood is some how less authentic than a cabinet made with flint tools. We don't deny people who write compiled programs in a high level language without understanding every branch of the AST and every transistor setting authorship of their programs. Just because something is somewhat non deterministic and draws from the wealth of previously curated human knowledge does not make it an independent agent and not a tool. The people who find AI generated work 'sad' are implicitly sad about the democratization of knowledge and the lowering of barriers to entry to producing things. The thing produced is still a human product. Rather than saying it is an ai creation we can say it was author prompted and compiled of the combination of the author's intent and the store of human knowledge and reasoning trained into an LLM. What is there to be sad about a new tool existing to make things?
Thanks for making my point for me, although probably not in the way you intended.
The credit for the Doordash meal should be given to the person placing the order. If it weren't for their amazing prompting^Wclicking skills, which make food materialize out of thin air, we would not be eating today.
> Had I done it manually, there's also no way to prove I created it without LLM help
Of course there is -- ask you about it.
The coolest interview process i ever participated in (at MIT Lincoln Lab) was structured this way, and seems 100% LLM-proof. The interview was: give a talk about a cool/impressive technical thing you did for an hour and then answer questions from the interviewers about it for an hour. No way to succeed there without actually understanding.
Yup. I got excited for a bit, until I loaded the page and saw it was slop. I still would be impressed if someone actually took the time to learn about and implement it for themselves.
Yeah, and it seems they didn't even physically build it (which is most of the point of these retro projects), else where are the photos? So this is an emulation of a vibe coded processor. Couldn't they at least have added a three.js animation of bits flying around or something?!
Why waste tokens building the computer when all you are going to show the user is the crappy web page? (the AI that created it may have had the same thought)
It'd take a few extra sentences to get the details, but I'm confident enough that it would work that I'd rather save my tokens for something more personally interesting.
I have a hobby project I'm working on - little telephone exchange design. And now that it occurs to me - I would like to visualize it in the rack form it would have if built. I really am at a loss how to prompt Claude for that. I've previously tried producing SVG diagrams with mediocre results.
I'm just a few sentences of a prompt away from a 3D visualization of the rack with the cables etc.? I guess I never did have the flair for visual design.
Sometimes people disagree, don't take it personally. You might be right and they're wrong, but even still you don't have to blow up about it. That's why you got flagged.
Yes, the secret ingredient of these kinds of AI projects is being rich and spending an ungodly amount of money on it.
I kinda get it as a tech demo, but projects like this leave a bad taste in my mouth because I'm not sure what they're really supposed to accomplish for the author or the community. It's probably not something the person was genuinely interested in, it has no commercial or educational value, so it just... sucks the air out of a hobby? There are quite a few people who designed and built their own computers from discrete gates, and we're sharing this page instead.
It has long been known that you can build any gate from NAND gates.
So you can take an existing model of a computer, turn everything that isn't a NAND into a collection of NAND gates, then run software for the original computer.
I think the takeaway is that we have to think bigger, much bigger, now that AI coding is essentially "solved". Anyone can "write" an ARM simulator now, so that can't be the pinnacle of engineering. I'm thinking about buildings that couldn't be built (reasonably) by one person.
I'll give an example of what I'm working on. There's a model for segmenting organs from CT scans. There's another model for calculating radial diameters of blood vessels from CT scans. You can combine the two and approximate how much blood flow each organ gets based on its segmented volume and the sum total radial diameter of vessels feeding it. You can then render all of that in an app that shows perfusion to that organ.
The idea is to combine these models to extract every ounce of usable information from a CT scan that might be useful for procedural planning (I'm an interventional radiologist). While each algorithm would take weeks/months to implement, Opus 5.5 can do them in minutes to hours and then stitch them together. The results thus far have been better than anything I've seen.
How do you know what Opus 5.5 is doing? How do you know it's correct?
Just earlier today, I had Opus 5.5 try and read an X-ray. It struggled to give any real information.
Stitching algorithms together is also not hard.
What's the point if you didn't do it yourself?
Feels like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gId2HsHvSgs
If you have not tried panning the camera and zooming in to one of the chips, you are missing out.
Bravo to the author. This is inspiring work.
I was about to say that's a whole lot of gates for not a lot of computer, but then saw that rom and ram are also an array of nand gates.
It's likely based on or inspired by Nand2Tetris.
Sorry to be pedantic but...every "boolean" logic gate can be made out of NAND gates pretty trivially (XOR too for that matter). So you just have to design a computer from logic gates and then decompose each one into NANDs.
"I made a computer out of n logic gates" doesn't sound as cool I guess?
Granted I am criticizing the concept and post title, not the execution.
I thought this was generally known?
I don’t have any familiarity with what’s considered the state of the art here, but I was wondering if the number of nand gates used is significant? So maybe this is neat because it uses less than was though possible?
Edit: looks like from reading some additional comments here that this isn’t particularly novel in that regard though…
This is pretty sad. Seeing this a couple of years ago would be mind blowing. An impressive technical feat by someone with grit and resilience to painstakingly build this from scratch.
Today? Meh.
I've build a similar project in university in two weeks with lisp, spending 30 minutes before bed on it. The difference being that it started with analogue voltages in the transistors.
I'm starting to think people impressed by LLMs are for the first time in their life not using a hammer on fastening screws and deeply impressed by tools that font fight them every step of the way.
I had the exact same thought. I vibecoded a MOS6502 emulator a few months back in Rust. My Rust skill is weak, and I learned absolutely nothing about the 6502 or CPU design. Had I done it manually, there's also no way to prove I created it without LLM help making the whole exercise less appealing overall.
> there's also no way to prove I created it without LLM help
You don't need to prove it, that was never a requirement. You can simply say it. The only complication is that there's a fair number of people who, for some reason, really want to pass LLM output as their own. They are present on HN too. But here's another ancient trick to overcome that: reputation. Either the reputation you already have, or reputation you build over time. If you have a reputation as an honest person with genuine interest in software, you really don't have to worry, and you will have audience for your work.
I'm very grateful I have public pre-LLM projects I can point at (including a 6502 emulator!), and I have absolutely no idea how I'd go about bootstrapping the same kind of reputation starting from scratch.
Unfortunately few of us have such reputation to truck with. I think the reality is there is no point in showing off manually coded work any more. All that stuff is really left for self-edification, and increasingly so as AI becomes more capable.
> I think the reality is there is no point in showing off manually coded work any more
What was the point before? To have fun, build a community, and to get attention of hiring managers. The first two reasons are still there. The third is more questionable, but there's still plenty of companies that hire based on what you know, not how well you prompt.
Agreed. In the pre-LLM days, students always asked me how to "maximize" their hirability. The standard response was "have a passion project" and yeah, that did help people get hired in some ways. But the project was almost never the point of the demonstration. It was more to show that you are _the kind of person_ who sweats the details, who likes taking deep dives. For many of the best jobs, that's _still_ what they want; it's just now, a Github repository is no longer sufficient. That should not stop a passionate person from pursuing their passions.
LLM output should be credited to whoever prompted it. I don't get this hysteria. Llms are tools like compilers or chain saws. We don't say a cabinet made from milled wood is some how less authentic than a cabinet made with flint tools. We don't deny people who write compiled programs in a high level language without understanding every branch of the AST and every transistor setting authorship of their programs. Just because something is somewhat non deterministic and draws from the wealth of previously curated human knowledge does not make it an independent agent and not a tool. The people who find AI generated work 'sad' are implicitly sad about the democratization of knowledge and the lowering of barriers to entry to producing things. The thing produced is still a human product. Rather than saying it is an ai creation we can say it was author prompted and compiled of the combination of the author's intent and the store of human knowledge and reasoning trained into an LLM. What is there to be sad about a new tool existing to make things?
Thanks for making my point for me, although probably not in the way you intended.
The credit for the Doordash meal should be given to the person placing the order. If it weren't for their amazing prompting^Wclicking skills, which make food materialize out of thin air, we would not be eating today.
It more like you texted a carpenter to make you a wardrobe.
> Had I done it manually, there's also no way to prove I created it without LLM help
Of course there is -- ask you about it.
The coolest interview process i ever participated in (at MIT Lincoln Lab) was structured this way, and seems 100% LLM-proof. The interview was: give a talk about a cool/impressive technical thing you did for an hour and then answer questions from the interviewers about it for an hour. No way to succeed there without actually understanding.
stream it live on twitch or wherever, build a community there
Yup. I got excited for a bit, until I loaded the page and saw it was slop. I still would be impressed if someone actually took the time to learn about and implement it for themselves.
Yeah, and it seems they didn't even physically build it (which is most of the point of these retro projects), else where are the photos? So this is an emulation of a vibe coded processor. Couldn't they at least have added a three.js animation of bits flying around or something?!
Maybe ideas aren't so cheap anymore...
First thing I tried was "double-click: fly to this latch". Didn't work. AI slop?
edit: press tab first.
A nand gate takes 2 transistors. So 554,000 transistors if this were manufactured in a physical device.
By way of comparison, the Intel i386 had 275,000 transistors.
Most of the gate budget here is on SRAM used for system memory and video memory, so not exactly comparable to a i386 which had neither on-die.
4 transistors for a two-input NAND gate in CMOS.
1 transistor for DTL... certainly CMOS is more relevant.
ARM1 was only 25,000 transistors.
Impressed by visuals working so smoothly on mobile
I mean if this was someone taking Nand2Tetris several steps further it would be impressive.
Why waste tokens building the computer when all you are going to show the user is the crappy web page? (the AI that created it may have had the same thought)
OHH my god this is soo awesome, I wonder how people build such things.
They opened their AI agent and typed "make me a 16-bit computer built from NAND gates" and hit enter.
Go ahead and paste that into your coding harness of choice and see if you get this out.
It'd take a few extra sentences to get the details, but I'm confident enough that it would work that I'd rather save my tokens for something more personally interesting.
I have a hobby project I'm working on - little telephone exchange design. And now that it occurs to me - I would like to visualize it in the rack form it would have if built. I really am at a loss how to prompt Claude for that. I've previously tried producing SVG diagrams with mediocre results.
I'm just a few sentences of a prompt away from a 3D visualization of the rack with the cables etc.? I guess I never did have the flair for visual design.
4 sentences huh? I think I’m going to remain a doubter.
Sometimes people disagree, don't take it personally. You might be right and they're wrong, but even still you don't have to blow up about it. That's why you got flagged.
I'm sincerely curious, when was the last time you tried agentic coding?
Yes, the secret ingredient of these kinds of AI projects is being rich and spending an ungodly amount of money on it.
I kinda get it as a tech demo, but projects like this leave a bad taste in my mouth because I'm not sure what they're really supposed to accomplish for the author or the community. It's probably not something the person was genuinely interested in, it has no commercial or educational value, so it just... sucks the air out of a hobby? There are quite a few people who designed and built their own computers from discrete gates, and we're sharing this page instead.
It has long been known that you can build any gate from NAND gates.
So you can take an existing model of a computer, turn everything that isn't a NAND into a collection of NAND gates, then run software for the original computer.
They don’t. Not any more.