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cannoneyedtoday at 4:52 PM9 repliesview on HN

Hey HN!

I wanted to share something I built over the last few weeks: isometric.nyc is a massive isometric pixel art map of NYC, built with nano banana and coding agents.

I didn't write a single line of code.

Of course no-code doesn't mean no-engineering. This project took a lot more manual labor than I'd hoped!

I wrote a deep dive on the workflow and some thoughts about the future of AI coding and creativity:

http://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc


Replies

cheschiretoday at 7:21 PM

> I’m not particularly interested in getting mired down in the muck of the morality and economics of it all. I’m really only interested in one question: What’s possible now that was impossible before?

Upvote for the cool thing I haven’t seen before but cancelled out by this sentiment. Oof.

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filolegtoday at 7:18 PM

This is awesome, thanks for sharing this!

I am especially impressed with the “i didn’t write a single line of code” part, because I was expecting it to be janky or slow on mobile, but it feels blazing fast just zooming around different areas.

And it is very up to date too, as I found a building across the street from me that got finished only last year being present.

I found a nitpicky error though: in Brooklyn downtown, where Cadman Plaza Park is, your webite makes it looks like there is a large rectangular body of water there (e.g., a pool or a fountain). In reality, there is no water at all, it is just a concrete slab area.

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cannoneyedtoday at 6:41 PM

Sorry about the hug of death - while I spent an embarassing amount of money on rented H100s, I couldn't be bothered to spend $5 for Cloudflare workers... Hope you all enjoy it, it should be back up now

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ivangeliontoday at 6:53 PM

Want to thank you for taking the time to write up the process.

I know you'll get flak for the agentic coding, but I think it's really awesome you were able to realize an idea that otherwise would've remained relegated to "you know what'd be cool.." territory. Also, just because the activation energy to execute a project like this is lower doesn't mean the creative ceiling isn't just as high as before.

reliumtoday at 7:09 PM

Very cool. Street names with an on/off toggle would be nice.

bigwheelstoday at 5:27 PM

Very impressive result! are you taking requests for the next ones? SF :D Tokyo :D Paris :D Milan :D Rome :D Sydney :D

Oh man...

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xnxtoday at 5:29 PM

I see you used Gemini-CLI some but no mention of Antigravity. Surprising for a Googler. Reasons?

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ChrisArchitecttoday at 5:11 PM

Appreciate that writeup. Very detailed insights into the process. However those conclusions left me on the fence about whether I 'liked' the project. The conclusions about 'unlocking scale' and commodity content having zero value. Where does that leave you and this project? Does it really matter that much that the project couldn't exist without genAI? Maybe it shouldn't exist then at all. As with alot of the areas AI touches, the problem isn't the tools or use of them exactly, it's the scale. We're not ready for it. We're not ready for the scale of impact the tech touches in multitude of areas. Including the artistic world. The diminished value and loss of opportunities. We're not ready for the impacts of use by bad actors. The scale of output like this, as cool as it is, is out of balance with the loss of huge chunk of human activity and expression. Sigh.

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