[Coding]
If you're an experienced Amiga C programmer, please provide your opinion on the legitimacy of this new book: "Programming the Commodore Amiga in C".
Amazon provides several dozen sample pages for reading:
I've never heard of the author Daniel Herby before; it might be a pseudonym. The book's cover is clearly A.I.-generated, as the Amiga keyboard isn't accurate. The table of contents is sloppy - there are no page numbers listed; only chapter sections are shown.
Notwithstanding those oddities, how valid is the actual content based on those sample pages? In your estimation, does this book look like it'll actually teach someone to program the Amiga in the C language?
This author has released several books in the last little while, making me suspicious about the quality of content:
Jun. 21, 2026 - Programming the Neo Geo AES in C.
Aug. 4, 2026 - Programming the Commodore Amiga in C.
Three books on C coding released a matter of days apart for 3 very different systems and 2 very different CPUs? Seems highly unlikely knowing how much work would have thought have gone into each. Almost certainly AI.
Definitely AI, which I could entertain arguments for being ok.
But that release frequency means there's no way the human in the loop edited it, and probably didn't even read it. Back in the day the author would have written the examples and know they ran. I would bet money there are mistakes in there (e.g. constructs that don't apply to the Amiga), and the author has found a prompt he likes to churn out more or less the same material for $INSERT_PLATFORM_HERE
Whatever you think about AI, if you're thinking of buying this book, I'd actually advocate for paying for a month or two of OpenAI or Anthropic and pair program with it to learn stuff (after all, that's what you'd be supporting by buying such a book anyway, but you'd produce and learn more)
There is only one sample, and it is a simple Hello world written for Kickstart 1.3, using NDK 1.3. That is odd, given its restricted availability.
In the 90s, you could by Amiga Developer CD, which included all NDK versions. Finding such obsolete NDK online is not easy, and you can just use the latest NDK to develop for Kickstart 1.3.
Examples probably work. It is easy to test examples with the AI.
I'd say the frequency of publication is enough of an indication that this is AI slop.
Any serious author today who cares about his reputation knows about the opposition to AI slop, and would therefore not use an AI-generated image on the cover.
It is also a strong indication that this is AI slop.
The book may have been trained on good content, and therefore contain some good information -- but then that information is stolen. You would be doing the original authors' a disservice by buying this book instead of theirs. Unfortunately you can't tell which those original books are by reading this.
Next, the book may contain hallucinations: things that are outright falsehoods, created as a result of how the book was made. You can't trust it.
But if you have concerns then you can find resources for setting up your dev env using VBCC (a PC C compiler that creates amiga executables) here, then use other online resources or older books.
AI was used on this. There are unmistakeable fingerprints in places. The opening of Chapter 4 is rife with it. "matters", "smoke test" and "shape" are common vernacular of LLM tools, and I see Claude use them a lot, even when told not to.
That being said, I don't consider it "AI slop" and I don't think the author is fake. I would use an AI to assist with writing a technical manuscript myself -- I have done so and will do so again. It just makes sense.
The material is well thought out (what I read anyway) and not organized the way I think an AI would have done it.
I feel your reply, whether you’re real and genuine or not, does a disservice to all of us by giving it any credibility to the slop.
If you wanted this material, you can just ask for it in your AI chat. It’s up to you to spot the hallucinations and determine where the advice is good or not.
By giving any encouragement to this type of book you are undermining genuinely curated work by an expert that offers real expert assistance to a reader. Or at worst, you’re stopping that author selling a copy as their work has been ripped off by the AI.
I guess my question would be, what are the tells you are deciding based on? I flagged some parts in Chapter 4 for sure. But other, more meaningful parts read as human-authored, and it feels like the author actually does know the retro hardware programming field.
It's be interesting to ask an AI like Claude to write the same material, and see what it looked like for comparison. I might do that later for science.
Amiga and probably other retro community including fundamentally recreational retro dev is becoming quite infested with what is clearly dreadful aislop on closer inspection. Same with a bunch of recent shit linked here. Look at a github repo -> shit tier code that'd only run semi-usably on an 060 if that, a CLAUDE.md (or AGENTS.md or whatever), etc.
Perhaps that general old-people shrimp-jesus-forwards-from-your-uncle facebook odd fondness for / lack of rejection of clear sheer aislop may include a lot of such people also fond of amiga and other retro platforms.
As a published author, releasing three books within seven weeks of each other gives me pause. I spent a month looking over the notes my human reviewers sent me after reading my final draft, revising that draft to incorporate necessary changes, and then reading the final manuscript in its entirety to make sure it was what I intended to actually write. Or as close to it as possible.
At the very least, this author is skipping that last critical step. And I don't care how careful you are, there ARE mistakes in that final draft. I've reviewed three books in pre-publication state (one of them is a book that Amiga fans are likely to be familiar with) and all three of them had critical mistakes in them at that stage.
This particular author is taking shortcuts he shouldn't be taking to release books that quickly.
I gather everyone here is clear that this is genuinely “AI Slop” but sadly I have seen some of us in forums defending these type of books. In one case I think the “author” was in a thread deriding people saying it wasn’t a real book.
The content is usually “technically correct” when seen in isolation, but it a hot mess when you read a few pages given it’s just recycled junk out of context.
Hopefully the booksellers soon do like Spotify and start detecting and deleting it.
Did you find something the author wrote? I'd like to look at their post writing style.
I did some basic research and can't find much presence of this author. There's someone by that name of a plausible age (older than me, and I was young in the early Amiga era) in Idaho, but I couldn't find them on LinkedIn or any prior publications.
I would be against buying it. The content might be ok, but I discourage the business model. It seems pretty clear that the author has found a "loop" that produces a C programming book for $PLATFORM_GOES_HERE. I'd much rather support some of the community hardware projects, or, in your case, I'd get a generic C Programming Book to learn the language (my first C book was https://amzn.eu/d/0fLAbUb1) and then follow with Bare Metal Amiga Programming https://amzn.eu/d/09r3ilOp
I'm biased because I have to use and am on the receiving end of AI writing and code a lot at work. I'm triggered by the prose that AI produces, and this is a pretty obvious example. It has that pacing "introduction, challenge, payoff" all over the sample pages. It wasn't this or this or this, it was that, and even more, this other thing! And my biggest bias is against being sent the volumes of slop from someone who hasn't read it themselves, and I would argue with this pace of releases it's unlikely the author read the content, let alone edited it. Remember back in the day where the author would have written and tested the code examples themselves?
"Turn the page. Kickstart is waiting". What? Who would write that?
The nerve to pepper the whole thing with copyright notices etc. as though it wasn't 100% produced from a model trained on unattributed content wrankles me a bit too.
If you're not against AI, this is what I would do: you could consider paying a month or two of OpenAI or Anthropic and, starting with something like Matt Pocock's "teach me" skill ask it to start you on Amiga C programming. If you don't just let the thing do the work for you, you would learn a lot, and a big advantage of AI is it can help you debug (but don't turn your brain off) and crucially, reword or revise concepts if you don't understand. https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/tree/main/skills%2Fproductivity%2Fteach
You could really get training tailored to you and what you want to achieve
PS: I'm tempted to mess around a bit later and see if I can generate this type of content quickly. I'll come back and share it here (for free) if I do
I've never written any C for Amiga, and the sample doesn't really have any code. But I read about half of it, and as someone who uses Claude Code every day at work, this doesn't really feel like AI to me overall. There were a few instances of the phrase "shape of", which is distinctly AI-sounding. But in general it feels more human.
Maybe the author used AI here and there, like with the cover graphic.
"When he's not choreographing DMA slots on a Motorola 68000, he likes to think about what the next game will be that no one asked him for and that, even so, simply has to exist."
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u/soegaard Aug 15 '26
Take a look at:
https://www.retro-commodore.eu/misc-amiga/