PalmOS Lemmings

The only substantive AI-related turn in an otherwise nostalgic preservation thread was a reader’s worry about code provenance. They described AI-generated code as having become common enough in their professional life that even a small retro-code project can no longer be approached as an uncomplicated human artifact. For them, the appeal of old software is not merely that it runs on limited hardware; it is the chance to study choices made by real programmers under real constraints. That pleasure is being eroded by the need to investigate dates, commit histories, and authorship before trusting what they are reading. Other readers pushed back indirectly with evidence rather than argument: the project’s initial source appears to originate around 2001, while later repository activity looks like ordinary maintenance and fixes. This gave some confidence that the code is historically authentic rather than a modern AI reconstruction. The wider discussion celebrated Palm OS preservation, old games, and the original developer’s work, but those comments did not engage AI itself. On the AI question, the thread lands on guarded reassurance: provenance can still establish trust, but AI’s spread has made that verification feel newly necessary.