$80 😬

you can check out the final build + full git history from the weekend here:

🔗 github.com/eddmann/phpboy

honestly, i didn’t know what to expect from the remote agent workflow - and doing all this from my phone felt unreal (and a bit of a gimmick) at first.

but by the end of the weekend, it actually started to click. 💭

i wanted multiple frontends, including a php-wasm build (which technically works… just incredibly slow). 🐢

with claude’s help, i’ve now ticketed up the remaining issues to work through this week.

it’s not fully complete yet, a few things still need work:
- full colour support
- audio issues
- frontend: sdl2 desktop build
- frontend: wasm performance

by monday morning, i pulled the repo from github… and ran pokemon red in my terminal. 🤯

most of my time was spent reviewing the generated test coverage describing the emulator’s behaviour - rather than micromanaging the implementation details.

but throughout the weekend i ended up learning so much - t-cycles vs m-cycles, z80 quirks, apus, vblank timing…

some of the agent’s work i rejected at the PR stage, kicking off slightly different prompt variations to explore multiple approaches before settling on one i liked.

to manage context i would split up deep-dive and implementation work, commiting findings in-between.

on saturday afternoon i was literally at a social gathering, sneaking a quick merge to add apu support into the emulator 🤯

it got a bit addictive ngl.

what made it interesting though was the process.

the back-and-forth with agents, github, and ci/cd - all happening from my phone. 📱

this isn’t exactly a novel problem space - there’s plenty of prior art, great docs (pandocs), solid reference builds like sameboy, and test roms (blargg, mooneye) to validate correctness.

friday night, i put together a PLAN md with cGPT’s help, then got the remote agent to start building step-by-step - each stage had clear goals and outcomes before moving on.

first step - come up with a name.

then, obviously, get cGPT to generate some artwork (because why not).

i’ve always wanted to build a game boy emulator.

it’s been a while since i did a personal project in php, so when claude web dropped $1000 of credit to use before nov 19th, i figured it was the perfect excuse to finally build one. 🎮

honestly finding this more valuable than strava's 'ai' features

good excuse to explore FastMCP and uv in the python ecosystem

includes cdk to provision remote instance on aws lambda

actual conversational insights > generic training suggestions

#mcp #python

Blast from the past! Struggle to think of a song I didn’t like from that album