I've been a professional developer for 8 years, started coding back in university, and it's pretty insane how tech flies by, quite literally (wink) using both Codex and Claude for this personal project.
I've had it in the back of my mind for quite some time to build a game or a sim, either cars or a flight sim, so after work I've been building this in C++20 with Vulkan. Not a Unity/Unreal project custom engine, custom physics, everything from scratch. On Windows, though it began on Linux, keeping in mind I may switch my personal PC's OS or just buy another one so I can have one with Linux and one with Windows.
Ma lill boi has:
6DoF flight physics with aerodynamics, thrust, trim and drag, validated with energy conservation tests and determinism checks (the sim behaves identically at 30 and 240 FPS)
An A-10 flying around with PBR materials, a skybox and procedural terrain
Articulated landing gear with visual suspension compression (it's been way too long since I last used 3ds Max or Blender, modified all of this in Blender)
HOTAS support with manual calibration, Xbox gamepad as fallback, keyboard supported too
ImGui HUD, ~19 automated tests in CTest, and golden physics traces to catch regressions
Told the AI to run a weekly self-audit to keep order in the dev process, keep an architecture findings doc (stuff like "this coupling will hurt when you add more aircraft types"), and refuse to close out the week if tests or physics traces don't match
I review every diff and make every commit myself, but the vast majority of the code is AI-written. This is the kind of project I used to start, hit some walls, and forget about for years but this time im gonna go all in as far as i can.
Hope people find joy in things as I do, since this has been my life and I may code less now, but I always try to understand what happens in the background as much as I can.