For my first day, I chose to start with ChatGPT. Admittedly, it’s a general-purpose AI and not one specialized in software development, but I figured it would be a good starting point. My goal I had a fairly clear idea: develop a small game in C. I had also read that for anything related to graphics, it was better to use assembly language. So I planned to rely on ChatGPT to guide me through that language. 😉 ...
For this vibe coding session, I decided to test Copilot Pro, taking advantage of the few free trial days. And to put all the chances on my side, I started directly from Olivier P’s repository: 👉 OlivierP-To8/BootFloppyDisk My objective With ChatGPT, I hadn’t managed to create my own code nor to use Olivier’s project to generate a working disk image for the MO5. Yet, in theory, everything seemed simple: I take the same source, copy it into my repo, compile it, use Olivier’s tools… no reason for it to break. ...
As part of my job, I had the opportunity to test Augment. During those professional tests, I found it very relevant, almost “proactive”. By proactive, I mean: not only answering the request, but also anticipating unexpressed problems, proposing alternative solutions, and drawing attention to critical points… you get the idea. I was honestly impressed. Augment offers a 7-day free trial for its coding agent, which was perfect timing: I was planning to run my experiments over the weekend anyway. ...
The goal of this day 5 was to solve a problem that was fairly simple on paper, but blocking in practice: where to locally host my MO5-dedicated RAG server. Quick reminder: what is a RAG server? A RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) server is a backend that combines: a search engine (often based on embeddings / vectors) a knowledge base (documents, sources, archives…) an LLM (local or remote) The idea is simple: 👉 instead of asking a question “into the void” to a model, we retrieve relevant information from a database, then inject it into the prompt. ...
In a previous episode, I ran quite a few tests and experiments to understand how to code for an MO5. I had asked the AI to summarize what we had learned into Markdown files. The underlying idea was to be able to share this experience with my new MO5 projects without having to copy .md files into each repository. Spoiler alert: vibe coding costs money 😢 The RAG server idea One simple way to share knowledge and context is through a RAG server. ...
After my experiments with Augment, I had an idea in mind for a few days. Create my own C library to make development on the MO5 easier. Nothing huge. Just something to avoid rewriting the same bits of code over and over again. Augment had already generated a few utility functions. But the ones that felt truly fundamental to me were these: char mo5_getchar(void) { asm { swi fcb $0A } } void mo5_putchar(char c) { asm { ldb c swi fcb $02 } } In my head, everything started from there. Those two functions as a base, and then rebuilding the rest around them. ...
Following Day 7, I reached an important milestone in my exploration of C development on the Thomson MO5: I finally had two fully functional tutorials. They were still simple, but they were stable, reproducible, and understandable. At that point, they relied on two very different approaches: one tutorial using my home-made string, stdio, and ctype libraries another tutorial based exclusively on cmoc.h It was the right moment to step back and analyze what CMOC really provides. ...