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.
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.
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 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 who hire based on what you know, not on how well you prompt.
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?!
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.
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.
4 sentences huh? I think I’m going to remain a doubter.
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.
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.
ARM1 was only 25,000 transistors.
4 transistors for a two-input NAND gate in CMOS.
1 transistor for DTL... certainly CMOS is more relevant.
Impressed by visuals working so smoothly on mobile
I mean if this was someone taking Nand2Tetris several steps further it would be impressive.
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 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 who hire based on what you know, not on how well you prompt.
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?!