I won’t pretend the ethics around AI are simple—they aren’t. I don’t think you’re wrong to care about this. But I also don’t believe I’m a thief for using AI to go further, faster, than I could on my own right now.
Can someone make a real NES game with the help of AI, without being an assembly language expert?
The answer is yes. You're looking at the proof. Flappy Paratroopa is a complete NES game — sprites, scrolling, collision, sound, high score saves — built in 23 days with Claude Code by Anthropic. It runs on real hardware. It's not a ROM hack or a demake. It's original code, written from scratch.
I am not an assembly expert. I'm a web developer. I knew "some" things about how the NES works — the basics of how graphics and sound are handled, the general memory layout — but I had never shipped a game for it. Every previous attempt over the years had failed.
This time, I had an AI that could fill in the gaps.
