No Carmack or Stallman. Just the right person at the right time.

The "clear room" framing is the most interesting part of this to me. It's essentially using the AI as a way to rebuild something from spec without looking at existing implementations, which has legal implications for emulation but also tells you something about the model's capabilities.

If Claude can produce a working Z80 emulator from documentation alone, it means the model has internalized enough about processor architecture, instruction sets, and timing behavior to reconstruct a functional implementation. That's qualitatively different from pattern-matching on existing emulator code.

From antirez's writing what comes through is that the value isn't "AI wrote my code" — it's that AI made it practical to attempt a project that would have been a multi-week time investment as a weekend experiment. The bottleneck for many side projects isn't knowledge or skill, it's calendar time. Compressing that changes what's worth attempting.

The problem is that it will have been trained on multiple open source spectrum emulators. Even "don't access the internet" isn't going to help much if it can parrot someone else's emulator verbatim just from training.

Maybe a more sensible challenge would be to describe a system that hasn't previously been emulated before (or had an emulator source released publicly as far as you can tell from the internet) and then try it.

For fun, try using obscure CPUs giving it the same level of specification as you needed for this, or even try an imagined Z80-like but swapping the order of the bits in the encodings and different orderings for the ALU instructions and see how it manages it.

> I believe automatic programming to be already super-human, not in the sense it is currently capable of producing code that humans can’t produce, but in the concurrent usage of different programming languages, system programming techniques, DSP stuff, operating system tricks, math, and everything needed to reach the result in the most immediate way.

As HN likes to say, only a amateur vibe-coder could believe this.

So what you're saying is that it's not just the machine-readable documentation built over decades of the officially undocumented behavior of Z80 opcodes—often provided under restrictive licenses—it's also the "known techniques and patterns" of emulator code—often provided under restrictive licenses.

You use clean room everywhere in the article and clear room in the title. Is this on purpose?