Re:Show HN: I wrote a C++ ray tracer from scratch without AI
by ezekg on Monday June 15, 2026 @12:27PM
(#48543627)
I also wrote a huge chunk of my game by hand 8 years ago, but I wouldn't lead with 'it's built without AI' now because that would be disingenuous.
Out of 557 total commits in the repo, 510 have been done before the past 2 weeks. All those (minus 5 in 2023-2024) have been done on or before July 2022, months before ChatGPT had even launched.
Out of the 47 commits in the last 2 weeks, 26 were README updates / CI / docs. The remaining 21 commits are clearly cleanups, speedups, bugfixes, and tangential features like Blender import/export. Which leaves us with 505/557 commits (90%) if we're not generous --or 531/557 commits (95%) in the best case-- of non-AI commits to the repo.
OP clearly wrote most of the project by hand and has just been cleaning things up for public release the last couple weeks. Exactly as he disclosed in his comment.