Inspiration Forth, my view of AI
I was recently accused of using AI to make some of inspiration Forth, which isn’t true. The reason I was accused is that I didn’t completely edit the default README file created by gitlab when I made the repo. The README described what makes for a good README and had headers/sections pre made with instructions on what kind of things to add there. Both github and gitlab have had this sort of thing for years - I have maybe 50 or even 100 repos I made over the years. The README is a template, created by humans. They also have optional templates for issues to force people to add things like steps to reproduce and so on. I didn’t choose to use these.
I cannot stand the use of AI to make code, period. When I was working on the Console logic for Inspiration, it took several feature branches to move it along. The first being to just render individual characters on the screen, then colorized text, then cursor addressing, then (partial) ANSI escape sequence support, then ability to scroll back and view all the text printed to the console. These feature branches weren’t consecutive efforts. It took me a lot of thought to figure out the scroll back logic, and more than one aborted feature branch. So I worked on other things in the meanwhile.
The only time I used AI was a horrifying experience. I asked copilot to make a console with ANSI and scrollback support. It made it in seconds. When I looked at it, I saw someone else’s variable names. Logic that would take me days to get into before even trying to assess if it was even working code. I stopped looking at it after a few seconds. I felt like that code was lifted from someone else, without attribution. None of that code or any of its ideas has anything to do with Inspiration.
The Phred editor is something I worked on in my previous Forth implementations, and once in C++. Made from scratch, but patterned after vim. The Evade2 game is one I made 7 years ago for the company I worked for at the time. Originally in C++, I ported it in Forth to Inspiration.
Inspiration is a different animal as Forths go. It is graphics first, not console first. The concept of how C++ functions can be subroutine threaded is unique. The pthread ability is my own idea and creation. Every code word I made are either mine or from the 2012 Forth Standard.
I have no use for AI. The beauty of a desktop Forth is that my dictionary has thousands of words I already made and debugged to make new things from. And rapidly. I probably get more done in 2 days than I would with AI. It helps that I have been writing code since the early 1970s. I’ll let the features/issue board and over 800 commits to Inspiration speak for themselves.
Beyond this, I think AI slop is garbage and spam. It’s turning works of art into someone else’s trash. GitHub is becoming a landfill. Why GitHub? Because that’s where the chat bots tell people to upload their one day untested creations.
