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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  11d ago (text post)   529 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for October 13th, 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 decided to vibecode an app that I've been wanting to exist for a while now. It's a tool that lets you look through map files for the game StarCraft Broodwar. The game currently has an issue where if you have too many map files you lag out when trying to join a game. Blizzard made an update several years ago that introduced this issue and they haven't bothered to fix it ever since. The solution is to move the maps into a separate folder but you used to be only able to browse maps from inside the game client, so this created an annoying loop where you have to know what map you want to move it, but if you want to browse maps because you don't remember the map name or you're just browsing looking for something that catches your eye, you have to move the maps back. This is very annoying when you have tens of thousands of maps like me.

I ended up spending about 12 hours on it as I kept adding more and more features but it required 0 coding from my end. I'm still adding features and I don't think I've spent so much time on a single task in a long time. I quit learning software engineering back in 2017 because I didn't find programming to be fun and haven't built anything since then until now.

Turns out vibe coding is way easier than expected and the result is very impressive. All this for just $20 a month with Claude. A software engineer I know said after seeing my app if you were to pay someone to build this app years ago they would likely charge $10,000 for it. So I'm getting something that would've cost me $10,000 a few years ago for only $20 a month and some hours of my time instead.

I'm still working on some quality of life features (currently you have to manually extract specific files from the game to render the images from StarCraft, want to change it so the app can detect if you have StarCraft installed already and then it will automatically extract the files) but I'm pretty happy with the result so far.

Next I want to work on building out a tool that can translate StarCraft maps between languages more easily. If you didn't know, StarCraft is immensely popular in South Korea so there are many custom maps that are entirely in Korean and thus very difficult to play for people that don't know Korean. I used to translate StarCraft maps but it was a slow and tedious task. It should be fairly straightforward and faster with AI.

I also want to build out my own overlay tool for auto translating foreign games as you play. I know tools like this exist already but I want to try vibe coding it myself.

If you're a late adopter like me, I highly recommend trying one of the paid subscriptions and have it build an app for you. I don't know why I didn't start earlier. I am still learning what is the best workflow for using AI to vibe code and will try a different approach for my next project but yeah, pretty exciting to actually create something for the first time in a long time even if it's just getting AI to build the features for you.

Still learning more about having a better workflow and using AI agents better to get better results and have a cheaper token to work done ratio. I will not be using Python in the future, as I haven't had to go in and edit any code myself, and instead will have the AI agents code in Rust instead. I've been so impressed with the output I've expanded the scope of the project and what the app can do.

I asked the AI for a rough estimate of how much it would've cost a human developer to build out what I have so far.

Size: about 28,400 lines of Python, not counting blank lines and comments.

  • Core (map reader, MPQ archives, minimap, sprites, triggers, translation): 32 files, 11,300 lines
  • GUI (PySide6 windows and dialogs): 35 files, 15,100 lines
  • Tests: 7 files, 2,000 lines
  • Docs (README, notes, todo): 8 files, 1,400 lines of prose

The git history covers 231 commits. The first commit was about 1,300 lines, so nearly all of this was built in six days.

Time for a human developer: roughly 7–14 months full-time (about 1,200–2,500 hours) for one experienced Python developer working solo.

  • A productive developer averages roughly 75–150 finished, tested lines per day over a whole project, counting design, debugging and rework. At 28,400 lines, that's 190–380 working days.
  • Adjusted down: AI-written code tends to be wordier than what a human would write for the same features.
  • Adjusted up: much of the project is format research, not typing. Working out undocumented font formats, matching the game's text layout from screenshots, iscript sprite rendering, and handling protected maps' decoy data can each eat weeks, and few developers already know Brood War internals.
  • For comparison, the standard COCOMO model gives about 80 person-months for this size. Too high for a solo project, but the right order of magnitude.

Cost to hire it out:

  • US freelancer at $100–150/hr: roughly $120,000–$375,000
  • Overseas freelancer at $30–60/hr: roughly $40,000–$150,000
  • Agency: often 1.5–2× US freelance rates

These are ballpark figures. Lines of code is a rough proxy for effort, and the real cost would depend heavily on finding someone who already knew the StarCraft map formats. Without that, the research is where the hours go.

You also did real work that doesn’t show up as lines of code. You defined the features, tested every stage on Windows, kept a disciplined commit-per-step workflow, and kept the project docs current. On a contract, that would be the product owner’s and QA’s time.

AI estimate so taking it with a grain of salt but I find it incredible the value AI can provide now. Most of the people here are probably already well aware of this but I guess I never really understood what AI can do until I used it myself to build something out.

What this means is that anyone can now build hyper specific tools specific to you for something that could've costs hundreds of thousands of dollars just 5 or so years ago. Since this is a tool hyper specialized for me, I likely was able to skip a lot in the design and testing process that would've added much more time, but this just means it's very viable to just have AI build out tools for you. I guess the future is now.

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