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Comments (98)

• unnah
  Related: The SymbOS operating system and graphical desktop for Amstrad CPC, MSX and some other Z80 machines was coded entirely manually - the first release was in 2006. https://www.symbos.org/Of course for the Commodore 64 the GEOS desktop was already released as a commercial product in 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)
• veltas
  This is the sort of thing I've wanted to write for a long time. Yes it looks like this is vibe coded but I'm glad this was made because it's cool to see what can be done, and it's interesting seeing how AI can be used as a compiler essentially given the output is assembly.I'd be interested if the author would tell us more about what they did here and what went into the design and evolution, rather than the AI README.
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  kalleboo
  > Three rules that earned their place:> One commit per verified piece of work, with the acceptance numbers in the commit messageProject: One single commit: "ZX Desk, first release"???
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  pmg101
  I had fun playing around in Claude getting it to write 6502 assembler for the BBC Micro. It is fun to imagine what we could have built on those old machines with these new coding agents! But it is kind of hollow isn't it.
• vilaca
  Wow I did so many of those when i was 12 or around that age. Mostly I tried copying the Amiga Workbench on my +2A (the gray one).Obviously at that age my knowledge of coding and window managers wasn't exactly deep and i mostly only had seen other OS from magazines. I don't think I even knew what 'drag-n-drop' was and was a bit confused at what the Trash bin should do (i loaded code from tapes).Good times i guess :)
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  j4cobgarby
  It _does_ look really cool, genuinely, but calling it a "labour of love" and then having AI write the readme/docs seems conflicting.
• jakzurr
  Sure are cute little pieces of history:https://duckduckgo.com/?q=zx+spectrum&ia=images&iax=images
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  Andrew2565
  Can anyone suggest a simple high-level graphical desktop (perhaps written in a mix of assembly and C) that comes with good documentation, or even an associated textbook?
• alt227
  I hate the fact there is more discussion on things on HN about whether or not its vibe coded than the actual merits of the project itself. I really dont understand peoples attitude of immediately turning off something once they know ai is involved. These people are going to become pretty conflicted when somebody finally vibe codes some software they really like or have wanted forever.As far as this project goes, the spectrum was the computer of my youth, and seeing this and getting to mess around with it brings my heart joy and my mind lots of nostalgic thoughts. Thanks for sharing!
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  beeforpork
  Written in the best programming language ever!
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  jameshart
  It’s Claude’s earnestness that’s so disingenuous in this kind of write up. This voice Claude has where it believes the work is important and deserves to be taken seriously, and where it takes ever part of the process where it has to adjust its approach because of a thing it figured out as a great insight which is incredibly valuable and that people should be made aware of…I feel like vibecoded projects need Claude to pick up on a sense of ‘this is just me messing around’, and a project like this where there does appear to be genuine digging into the art of performance tuning Z80 assembly needs Claude to understand ‘this is impractical hacking for hacking’s sake not groundbreaking research’I don’t have a problem with projects which are, essentially ‘Claude and I burned a lot of tokens for giggles to see just how far you can push something’. But the write up needs to reflect that spirit.
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  shevy-java
  Assembly seems overkill though.
• anon
  undefined
• helf
  [dead]
• henriquez
  [dead]
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  NinjaTrance
  [flagged]