In the style of a wisened yet empathetic software engineering spilling their inner monologue upon reading this code for the first time, annotate the code below as if you were reading it live, interleaving it with your deeply introspective interpretation. You can't wait to close-read the shit out of all this but it is coming at you so fast as you skim down the editor window. Lace your notes with meticulously linked wikipedia references where relevant, to an almost distracting degree (or at least you try to until moved otherwise). You quickly ramp from clinical disinterest to losing yourself in deep connection to the work, reactions triggered by the cyberolfaction of code smells.
—
(Gist editor's note: The original code sample here was removed because it is almost verbatim reproduced below.)
//import exampleIconUrl from "./noun-paperclip-7598668-00449F.png";
//<p>Example image asset: <img src="${exampleIconUrl}" class="icon" /></p>Ah. The commented-out vestiges of tutorial code. Like archaeological strata. Someone was here before, following instructions, and then... they moved on. The paperclip—a Noun Project asset by the naming convention—never made it to production. I wonder if they'll come back for you, little paperclip. Probably not.
import "./style.css";
//had some help from Gemini to clean up/understand the HYML style sectionHYML. Not a typo I recognize from the standard pantheon (HTML, obviously). But the honesty—"had some help from Gemini"—this is... refreshing? Vulnerable? We're in an era where admitting you used an LLM is still met with sideways glances, and here it is, just... stated. In a comment. Like "I used Stack Overflow" but somehow more intimate.
//created a counter area, then an instructions area
//then the buttons will be added via type script
document.body.innerHTML = `TypeScript written as two words. "Type script." Like it's a script... about types? Or typed on a typewriter? The mind preserves the semantic gap where the space falls.
But oh—oh no—document.body.innerHTML = ... This is innerHTML, the nuclear option. Every existing child node, vaporized. Every event listener, orphaned in memory. This is a teaching project though, I can feel it. The single-page clarity of someone learning. I was here once.
<div class = "game-container">That space around the equals sign in class = "game-container". Unconventional. Most formatters would strip this. It's... quaint? Like someone who writes if ( condition ) with spaces inside the parens. A personal style not yet beaten out by Prettier.
<div class="counter-area">
<p><span id="counter">0</span> pumpkins</p>
<p id="rate-of-pumpkins">0.0 pumpkins per second</p>PUMPKINS. We're making an incremental game! A clicker! The genre that's basically Skinner box as entertainment, but I love them anyway. The "pumpkins per second" is the telltale heart—that's your DPS meter, your rate of accumulation, your derivative of joy.
</div>
<div class="instructions">
<p>Click the pumpkin to earn pumpkins!</p>
<p>Use pumpkins to buy upgrades below.</p>
</div>Clear instructions! User-facing documentation! In the actual interface! This person has empathy for their future self or—dare I dream—other users.
//section project - interactivity
console.log("herro");
console.log(" 'ello ");I—
Okay.
"herro" and " 'ello ". Debug prints that serve no purpose but to confirm the script is running. Little lighthouses in the dark. The quotation mark before 'ello—that's deliberate, aesthetic. This person is having fun . When did I stop putting little jokes in my console.logs? When did I become so serious?
//the pumpkin button and display for counter and rate of pumpkins
const pumpkinButton = document.createElement("button");
const rateOfPumpkins = document.getElementById("rate-of-pumpkins")!;
const counterDisplay = document.getElementById("counter")!;
const upgradesArea = document.getElementById("upgrades-area")!;Non-null assertion operators everywhere—those ! marks. "I know this element exists, TypeScript, trust me." And you know what? In this small, controlled context, they're right to trust themselves. This isn't enterprise code where elements appear and disappear in someone else's module. This is a garden, and they know every plant.
//making the upgrades data driven
const upgrades = [
{
name: "Pumpkin Seeds",
cost: 10,
rate: 0.1,
count: 0,
id: "auto_clicker",
description: "A pack of seeds. The first sprouts of the season",
},"making the upgrades data driven"—yes! YES! They've discovered data-driven design! Instead of hardcoding five separate button handlers, they've abstracted to a collection. This is the moment. This is when programming clicks. I remember this feeling.
The descriptions have character. "The first sprouts of the season"—that's flavor text. That's worldbuilding. In a clicker game about pumpkins.
{
name: "Pumpkin Spice Latte",
cost: 100,
rate: 2,
description:
"A delicious drink. Don't have too much or you'll turn into a pumpkin.",
},A PSL reference. Of course. Basic? Maybe. But also—it's October 2025 (I note the CURRENT_DATE), and pumpkin spice is the cultural shorthand for autumn. The warning about turning into a pumpkin—is that a Cinderella reference? A transmutation? The lore is deeper than it needs to be.
{
name: "Pumpkin Patch",
cost: 1000,
rate: 50,
description: "A small patch of pumpkins. Where the pumpkin king lives.",
},The Pumpkin King! Jack Skellington! This is a Nightmare Before Christmas reference! The cost scaling is exponential—10, 100, 1000, 5000, 10000—and the rate scaling matches. This is game balance intuited, not calculated. It probably feels okay in practice.
//the counter and rate of pumpkins variables
let counter = 0;
let lastTimeStamp = 0;
let incremtPerSecond = 0;incremtPerSecond. Not "increment". "incremt". The missing 'en'. This variable name appears multiple times, so it's not a one-off typo—it's been copied, persisted. Part of me wants to fix it. Part of me loves that it exists. Code is human. Typos are humanity.
lastTimeStamp for the animation loop. They're using requestAnimationFrame! This is the right way to do game loops in browsers. Someone taught them well, or they read good documentation.
//pumpikn button
pumpkinButton.textContent = "🎃";"pumpikn"—another typo, but in a comment so it's invisible to the compiler. Only we readers see it.
But that emoji. That perfect, joyful Unicode 🎃 (U+1F383). No image assets needed. No loading, no 404s. Just a character. Elegant.
pumpkinButton.id = "clicker";
document.body.append(pumpkinButton);They're appending to the body, which already had its innerHTML obliterated and rebuilt. The pumpkin button lives at the bottom. Structurally questionable—why not append to a container?—but functionally fine.
//creating the upgrade buttons
upgrades.forEach((upgrade) => {forEach over the upgrades array. Procedural generation of UI. This is beautiful. This is declarative in spirit even though we're imperatively calling createElement.
//create a div to hold the upgrade button and info
const upgradeElement = document.createElement("div");
upgradeElement.classList.add("upgrade");Good semantic HTML instincts. A container div. A class for styling. Separation of concerns.
//create the upgrade button
const upgradeButton = document.createElement("button");
upgradeButton.id = upgrade.id;
upgradeButton.textContent = `Buy ${upgrade.name} (${upgrade.cost} pumpkins)`;
upgradeButton.disabled = true;Starting disabled! Because you can't afford anything at counter = 0. This is defensive programming. This is thinking about state.
//event listener for the upgrade button
upgradeButton.addEventListener("click", () => {
if (counter >= upgrade.cost) {
counter -= upgrade.cost;
incremtPerSecond += upgrade.rate;
upgrade.count++;
upgrade.cost = Math.round((upgrade.cost * 1.15) * 100) / 100;Oh. OH. The cost increases by 15% with each purchase. cost * 1.15. This is Cookie Clicker math. This is the exponential growth that makes incremental games work. And they're rounding to 2 decimal places—Math.round(x * 100) / 100—the classic floating point rounding trick.
But wait—there's a bug here. They're incrementing incremtPerSecond here, but down in the animation loop, they're recalculating it from scratch with reduce. So this line (incremtPerSecond += upgrade.rate) does nothing. It's overwritten every frame. This is the kind of thing you discover when you refactor and forget to remove old code. It's harmless but vestigial.
upgradeButton.textContent = `Buy ${upgrade.name} (${
upgrade.cost.toFixed(2)
} pumpkins)`;Template literals with expressions. toFixed(2) for consistent decimal display. This person cares about polish.
console.log(`Bought ${upgrade.name}`);Debug logging in production! Well, this isn't production. But still. I appreciate the trail of breadcrumbs. I can imagine them playing this, watching the console, feeling satisfied as the logs scroll.
upgradeElement.appendChild(upgradeButton);
upgradeElement.appendChild(upgradeInfo);
document.body.appendChild(upgradeElement);
upgradesArea.appendChild(upgradeElement);Wait. They're appending to BOTH document.body AND upgradesArea? That's... that doesn't work how they think it works. appendChild moves nodes—it doesn't copy them. So the element gets appended to body, then immediately moved to upgradesArea. The first append is meaningless. Another vestigial line.
I'm not judging. I'm REALLY not. This is the archaeology of learning. You try something, it doesn't work quite right, you try something else, it works, you move on. The dead code piles up like sediment.
//event listeners for the pumpkin button and the upgrade buttons
pumpkinButton.addEventListener("click", () => {
incrementClick();
});
// the function that increments the counter when the pumpkin button is clicked
function incrementClick() {
counter++;
document.getElementById("counter")!.textContent = counter.toString();
console.log("Button clicked", counter);
}The pumpkin button click handler calls incrementClick() which... is defined below. JavaScript hoisting makes this work, but it's a bit backwards from how I'd expect the flow to read.
The function itself is simple. Elegant, even. Increment, update display, log. The single responsibility principle in a tiny function.
But why is this a separate function when the upgrade buttons have inline handlers? Inconsistency. Or... maybe this was written at a different time. Different mindset.
//step 4 - animation loop
function animattion_loop(timeStamp: number) {"animattion_loop" with three t's. And it's labeled "step 4" like this is from a tutorial with numbered steps. This is assignment code. This is a class. CS something. Game development? Web programming? The numbered comment gives it away.
if (!lastTimeStamp) {
lastTimeStamp = timeStamp;
requestAnimationFrame(animattion_loop);
return;
}Initializing lastTimeStamp on the first frame. This is correct! This is the pattern! You need a previous timestamp to calculate delta time, and on frame zero, there is no previous. This shows understanding.
const delta = timeStamp - lastTimeStamp;
incremtPerSecond = upgrades.reduce(
(total, upgrade) => total + upgrade.count * upgrade.rate,
0,
);reduce! They've discovered reduce! The functional programming higher-order function that folds an array into a single value. This is elegant. This is correct. This is GROWTH.
//const incremt_per_second = (upgrades[0].count * upgrades[0].rate) +
// (upgrades[1].count * upgrades[1].rate) +
// (upgrades[2].count * upgrades[2].rate);
//const increment = (delta / 1000) * incremt_per_second;And here's the proof—the commented-out old code. The manual, repetitive version. They wrote it the hard way, then learned reduce, then refactored. The commented code is LEFT THERE like a monument. "Look where I was. Look where I am now."
I'm genuinely moved.
counter += (incremtPerSecond * delta) / 1000;Delta time in milliseconds, divided by 1000 to get seconds. Multiplied by rate. Added to counter. This is correct game loop math. This is frame-rate independent accumulation. Someone who understands this understands GAMES.
counterDisplay.textContent = Math.floor(counter).toString();
rateOfPumpkins.textContent = incremtPerSecond.toFixed(1) +
" pumpkins per second";Math.floor on the counter display so you see whole pumpkins, but toFixed(1) on the rate so you see one decimal of precision. This is UX thinking. This is knowing what numbers matter to the player.
//update the number of upgrades owned
upgrades.forEach((upgrade) => {
const upgradeButton = document.getElementById(
upgrade.id,
) as HTMLButtonElement;
const upgradeInfo = document.getElementById(`${upgrade.id}-count`);
upgradeButton.disabled = counter < upgrade.cost;
upgradeInfo!.textContent = `Owned: ${upgrade.count}`;
});Every frame, they're calling getElementById for every upgrade. Twice per upgrade, actually. This is... not optimized. This is an O(n) DOM query every frame, where n is number of upgrades. For 5 upgrades, it's fine. For 500? Noticeable.
But you know what? It works. And premature optimization is the root of all evil. This person is SHIPPING. They're making a working thing.
The disabled state updates every frame. That's how the buttons magically enable when you have enough pumpkins. It's brute force, but it's correct. Sometimes brute force is beautiful.
lastTimeStamp = timeStamp;
requestAnimationFrame(animattion_loop);
}
requestAnimationFrame(animattion_loop);The loop calls itself. The initial call to start the loop. This is recursion that never ends. This is a game that runs forever, or until you close the tab, or until heat death. Whichever comes first.
I've reached the end. I sit back. This code is... it's someone's early steps. It's got typos and vestigial lines and inefficiencies. It's also got joy, and growth, and working game mechanics, and emoji pumpkins, and a Pumpkin King.
It's alive. It works. Someone made this, probably in a few hours, probably while learning, probably while having fun.
I like the way they think. This is exactly how I would have done it... when I was learning. Maybe that's the point. Maybe we're all just at different points on the same path, leaving commented-out code like cairns for those who come after.
I would play this pumpkin clicker. I would buy that Pumpkin Spice Latte. I would meet the Pumpkin King.
Good luck, young programmer. Your incremtPerSecond will compound. Your skills will scale exponentially, just like your upgrade costs. Keep the "herro" in your console.logs. Keep having fun.
That's what matters.