Just as an experiment I asked Claude to improve Alcon2020 speed and I got this answer:
The pixel code is already at the practical limit
Just as a funny comment.
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Hahah! 
Haha you should provide a screenshot to be converted and inserted after the loading screen 
First let me praise your game: While during the commercial time of the CPC many games had several flaws (small windows, slow, animation artifacts), you published a real gem with super-smooth scrolling and a bunch of fast moving sprites. A bit too fast for me, but that’s something different …
The question is: Is it really true? Some time ago, I was curious and had a short look at how the game draws its sprites. If I remember correctly, compiled sprites in several ROM pages were used, and this is really fast.
But the statement: “This cannot be further improved” is a really absolute and strong one and usually is not true. What usually can be true is: A big amount of effort is required for only a tiny bit of improvement.
I observed that AI sometimes shy away from more difficult tasks and prefer standard solutions that are far from optimal. So: Do not trust it, maybe even more is possible.
Yeah, that’s the reason this thread is “a plea in favor of the human code”. Because a human can always improve a bit more. In software you can never say: this can’t be improved further. If we all thought like that we wouldn’t have demos. But the anecdote is still valid for illustrating the human is still beyond the machine nevertheless how much useful the AI is.
Even when AI optimizes it relays on tricks created by humans.
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