Update as of Jul 19, 2026: As of now, GPT 5.6 Sol can do this. Will post some results soon!
I started working on adding raytracing (RTX) to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. As in my other posts, I’m generally trying to drive the project via autonomous LLM agents.
I was hoping the project could be as simple as running Claude Opus 4.6 in a loop, saying “implement RTX into this engine, make no mistakes.” I got surprisingly far with this technique. However, I started noticing that it hit a wall, and that it seemed to be bottlenecked by its ability to understand the engine’s screenshot output, identify issues, and figure out what to work on next.
I’ve felt this tension between “scrubs” and people trying to have fun, especially when playing competitive Smash. I do agree that it’s frustrating when people purport to be competitive but are actually scrubs. There are some points I think are missing though:
Games can change over time, especially when you complain a ton. Within the last two decades in Melee, wobbling was discovered (2006) and then finally banned (2019). The technique was degenerate, and hated in almost all levels of play. If people just sucked it up and dealt with it, I don’t think it would have been banned. If you’re not familiar, wobbling results in you being unable to move and pummeled until you die for up to minutes at a time.
Being competitive is great; but it’s not like being competitive and “having fun” are more or less honorable than each other. When you engage in an activity with someone else, the goal isn’t always to “completely crush them.” Sometimes, it’s just to have fun, right? In the case where some techniques aren’t “fun”, it seems fine to limit yourself from using them.
If anything it’s a bit socially awkward if you can’t sense the mismatch in competitive drive and don’t tailor to what your gaming partner is expecting.
Hollow Knight: Silksong came out recently, and I got so much fomo as I had never completed the previous entry. I’ve attempted to clear the game 2 times, and just started my third playthrough. As of finishing this entry, I beat the final boss and ended up getting the 2nd best ending.
Hollow Knight is hard. If you only have a cursory interest in video games, I don’t recommend the game. As someone who is mildly masochistic and isn’t exactly good enough for Elden Ring, Hollow Knight is at the perfect threshold in difficulty for me where I can clear bosses after around 10 tries and a crashout in my journal.
