It had been a minute since I tried, to intentionally clone anything. And the Photocraft guys got me to think about it again. I mean, how do you resist that kind of subversive temptation? I'll never know.
So I thought back in time a bit. To the apps I've loved and lost. And I settled on a product: Flash 5.
Concept: Fork the universe before Adobe bought Macromedia, and project this magical alternate timeline forward. So Flash, but sitting on top of WASM, Zig, and Bun!
God, remember Flash? How much fun we had with it? And wouldn't it be cool if we could do it with Typescript?
Two approaches that did not work
Anyway, first thing I tried was REA. It's popular. But the tools it uses aren't really all that useful unless you're working in the same target language, and want to produce exactly the same decisions.
Not helpful here.
Second thing I tried was letting Codex dig through the ui in a virtual container. It generated a lot of useful documentation and notes... but everything that came out of that effort looked... well very wrong. Comically so.
I should have had it take screenshots. Maybe that would have helped.
Documentation and precedent
The thing that finally worked, was investing in a scribd subscription and downloading all the old manuals, and dozens upon dozens of tutorials, and so much web scraping for precedent. Then, sorting that for editorial clarity, and prioritizing which pieces of which document had the highest signal for the coding agent to focus on.
Where the rebuild stands
Well, we're... about 110 billion tokens in at this point, and the ui can tween and do math. The movies compile. The file format works, and the project workspace is... finally stable.
So far, it's been about three weeks since I started that third method. Don't want to think about how much time I wasted on the first two.
And I figure... in about another three weeks, I'll be done, and ready to add things like lip reading, contactless, a curve editor, and some other quality of life stuff.
We're way outside the realm of "anybody can do this in a weekend."
