Refactoring

Today split itself between cleanup and storytelling: one branch did a broad safe-strings pass to make old text-handling code less fragile, while another added site generation files and the beginnings of a public project diary. That felt fitting, because from day two onward this repo had become both a WizBall rescue mission and a hands-on lesson in managing coding agents, with Codex and Claude via GitHub Copilot doing most of the typing while I learned how to brief them, review them, and stop them from confidently wandering off into nonsense.

This was the day PortMaster support stopped feeling theoretical: a substantial compatibility refactor landed, packaging moved into a proper portmaster/ area, docs and performance notes were reorganised, old bundled libraries were thrown out, and the renderer/platform work bent further toward the realities of handheld Linux hardware. By this point Codex and Claude via GitHub Copilot were doing most of the implementation heavy lifting, and the real project for me was learning how to manage coding agents well enough to keep the speed benefits without letting plausible nonsense sneak into the codebase.

This was one of the big days: a lot of the remaining Allegro-era runtime code was ripped out or replaced, input moved further onto SDL with proper scancode mapping and joystick support, sound and renderer code lost more legacy baggage, and the project felt much more committed to its SDL2 future. Codex and Claude via GitHub Copilot did most of the heavy lifting on the broad refactors, while I learned the increasingly useful skill of telling when the robots were being genuinely helpful and when they were just very energetically wrong.

Today was a reminder that sometimes progress looks like deleting code without setting the building on fire: unused texture and blending functions were cut, display scaling was simplified, and the SDL2 renderer path got less tangled up with leftovers from the Allegro/OpenGL era. This was also good coding-agent territory, because Codex and Claude via GitHub Copilot are quite happy to take first passes at pruning and simplification, provided you keep a close eye on them and make sure they have not removed some bizarre old ritual that was secretly keeping the whole game stable.

This was a refactoring day rather than a flashy one: the new SDL2 platform, input, and renderer code got reorganised into something more readable and sustainable, which matters because messy migration code turns every future fix into archaeology. By now Codex and Claude via GitHub Copilot were doing most of the heavy lifting, and the real lesson for me was learning to manage coding agents well, because asking them to help is easy and stopping them from enthusiastically “improving” a load-bearing wall is the actual skill.

Day two was when the project stopped being just a Linux rescue and became an SDL2 migration, with new platform layers for input, windows, timing, and rendering, plus enough renderer scaffolding to draw lines, quads, textures, sprites, and rectangles while the old Allegro/OpenGL world began its slow march toward retirement. It was also when I really started using coding agents seriously, with Codex and Claude via GitHub Copilot doing most of the keystroke-heavy work while I learned the more important skill of managing them properly: breaking tasks down, reviewing changes, steering them away from confident nonsense, and using them to chew through boring but necessary scaffolding much faster than I could by hand.