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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  2d ago (text post)   213 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for August 25th, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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I have been eyeballs-deep in Claude Code, getting it to write me a single-player ripoff of War Thunder so I can play with the tanks I've been modelling lately. Two nights in a row, I've managed to trip the AI safeties and trigger a lockdown due to excessive discussion of, ahem, internal ballistics, significant pressure events, and spallation scenarios. Claude says I shouldn't work on the project in automatic mode, so now I'm stuck manually approving tool calls like some sort of peasant.

...It's a shame, too. The discussion was legitimately stimulating; the sycophancy is easy enough to look past, and Claude's simulacrum of knowledge is broad enough that it trips the insight porn feeling while discussing artillery and its effects on armor. I'm using this for something I've got a moderate knowledge base for and a lifelong interest in, but something that's sort of bounded, focused on a specific project of limited scope. I got the equivalent of three or four serious motte comments out of it before the safeties chopped the convo, and really enjoyed modelling its "thinking" and framing arguments in reply. I can see how this would really do a number on someone who turned it loose in their actual life, started asking it for advice, bouncing ideas off it... AI psychosis or whatever we're calling it feels significantly more relatable after a couple weeks working with it.

What pricing, tooling and workflow do you use?

Have you used Github Copilot? If so, how do the two compare?

I'm doing the hundred bucks a month level. Tooling... pretty much none. I had Claude itself set up the project, and implemented a couple simple rules for handling Git. Workflow is that I describe what I want it to do and it does it, generally pretty well, occasionally with some bugs that need to be teased out.

...I feel like this is not a very useful answer, but it's how it's been going. I've used it to build a ballistics bench that calculates/extrapolates gun and shell stats from a few minimal initial parameters, set up a pipeline to store the data in spreadsheets, import the data back into the bench, and auto-generate prefabs based on the data. I'd previously coded raycast-based hit detection for shells, but it's expanded that to allow sequential penetrations, penetration based on shell velocity, velocity loss when penetrating, spalling/fragmentation, HE shells and fragmentation (this is the point that seems to be tripping its safeties), simple damage visualization to crew and components, armor values stored as textures, and Blender tooling to make building assets easier. It's helping me set up a breath-of-the-wild-style grass shader. I'm hoping it can handle the back-end of UI setup and enemy AI as well.

I haven't used git copilot. I might at some point, but Claude's monopolizing my time currently.

HE shells and fragmentation (this is the point that seems to be tripping its safeties)

I had a few western models nope out on generating a logo, presumably because of the title. They also didn't like depicting a corpse of an unfortunate bloke that the aliens got to. Thankfully the Chinese did a good job without complaining.

Thanks. The answer is perfectly useful.

What kind of tech stack are you using for your project?

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