[HN Gopher] Shepherd's Dog: A Game by Fable
___________________________________________________________________
Shepherd's Dog: A Game by Fable
Author : vnglst
Score : 181 points
Date : 2026-06-13 05:44 UTC (1 days ago)
HTML web link (koenvangilst.nl)
TEXT w3m dump (koenvangilst.nl)
| sixhobbits wrote:
| Enjoyed playing it, here's the direct link to play as otherwise
| you have to click from the article to the GitHub and then find
| the correct demo link
|
| https://vnglst.github.io/when-ai-fails/shepards-dog/claude-f...
| vnglst wrote:
| Thanks for that, I messed up copying the links into the
| article!
| esailija wrote:
| I didn't even have to play. Immediately after opening, some
| notification about rotating my phone is obscuring the
| instructions and I cannot read them.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Damn I couldn't load it on my Nokia n95 from 2007 either. Damn
| bruh, these silly devs should make this stuff work on
| everything.
| esailija wrote:
| I am on a flagship samsung that runs for example the Red
| Alert 2 browser port well.
|
| OP is just pushing slop, the 80% part anyone gets for free.
| (well 20 bucks)
| jna_sh wrote:
| " can it build a game idea I've had for years, in a single shot?"
|
| Do people do no research or introspection when they've had an
| "idea for years"? There are countless examples of this exact
| game. I played this on the Gameboy Advance! There's like 50 of
| them on the App Store right now.
|
| The standard "this almost certainly exists wholesale in the
| training data" applies, but I'm also interested in how you carry
| an idea for years and don't notice this, or whether the "idea"
| here was actually "using this thing that's been remade thousands
| of times as an AI benchmark".
|
| There's nothing wrong with remaking an old classic formula,
| especially in game dev. It's the describing it as "an idea I've
| had for years" that rings weird.
| redrobein wrote:
| While I agree that it isn't revolutionary that it could
| implement this from a single prompt, what's surprising to see
| is how well done this one is compared to the other tries. The
| controls and movement are smooth, the animations aren't
| jittery, the ui makes sense, there's a clear progression in
| difficulty. This model clearly "understands" the implementation
| of this game far better than the others did.
| nmstoker wrote:
| Yes, this subtly seems worth noting. That smoothness suggests
| that even if many of the concepts are common/non-original,
| the bringing together of various pieces in a form that works
| well on modern mobile browsers is still impressive - browsers
| are moving targets and even if there are open source versions
| of this, it's comparatively rare they'd get continual care
| and attention to stay fully current (unless implemented via
| an o/s engine)
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| Still, if the code for multiple similar games is in the
| training data, then that's worth thinking about.
| vnglst wrote:
| I also realized this, a quick Google search would've told me
| that this game has been made several times before, also way
| before I ever had this idea. Apparently it's a pretty obvious
| game idea.
|
| Ah well, it's still fun and it does appear to measure how good
| AI is in creating these kind of games.
| dools wrote:
| Well ... it's a measure of how good it is at reproducing a
| game that probably already exists in multiple forms in its
| training data.
| puttycat wrote:
| The question is more whether this game exists as open
| source somewhere in the training data (probably does).
| sevenzero wrote:
| You can't possibly think those models are only trained on
| open source data?
| raudette wrote:
| I agree - it's worth doing just for fun.
|
| I did the same recently just for fun - I really enjoyed
| "Gravity Force" on the Amiga - itself a lunar lander variant.
|
| Could a model build a Gravity Force like game I could run in-
| browser? Yep! (I never made it as good as Gravity Force -
| just got the basics down)
| fennecbutt wrote:
| I think that's exactly why AI is suited for 99% of stuff we do.
|
| I have pointed out on here before that instances of truly
| unique human ideas not grounded in nature or previous ideas
| from others is almost nil, there are not many examples that
| someone can give me. All human ideas and work is derivative.
|
| Elves? Humans with pointy ears. Werewolves? Humans mixed with
| wolves. Car tyre? Cart wheel...stone wheel/roller. Etc.
| jna_sh wrote:
| I feel like prior to GenAI, you'd have had to reckon with the
| true originality of your idea in some form as you did the
| research. Creatives having to confront their own
| unoriginality is such a thing it itself is reflected in
| countless pieces of media.
|
| So it's interesting to me that the creator here didn't
| encounter the tens of physically published versions, or the
| hundreds of them shipped to digital app stores, or all the
| codebases on GitHub, in the course of making this. I'm sure
| they would have done naturally prior to GenAI. Is that good
| or bad? I don't know! But it's interesting to me.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > the creator here didn't encounter the tens of physically
| published versions
|
| The simplest counterargument: since there are already tens
| of similar games out there, why didn't the _previous_
| authors, supposedly grass-fed genuine checkmark blood-
| through-their-veins humans didn 't notice the other
| 9-8-7-6-5... games, and still released their own version?
| Maybe because it was still that they wanted the game out
| there? Maybe because originality really isn't that common?
| Maybe because each individual had their own idea and spin
| to it? Maybe because they wanted the game out as _they_
| made it?
|
| Same for this author. How they made the game is irrelevant,
| and nitpicking the "originality" or anything else is silly.
| Something like this wasn't possible 3 years ago. Now it's
| possible. Deal with it, and stop trying to find ways to
| diminish it. It's a huge accomplishment any way you cut it.
| jna_sh wrote:
| My thoughts are less about the merits of creating
| something that already exists than they are about
| _knowing_ you are doing that. Which I think my post made
| very clear :)
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > I'm sure they would have done naturally prior to GenAI.
|
| I gave a simple counterargument to this. Since there are
| "countless" prior games, many of them released before
| genAI, your argument is pointless.
| jna_sh wrote:
| Do you think the only reaction to knowing you're not the
| first to do something is not to do it? Do you think I
| said that?
|
| To spell it out in case it is still non-obvious: knowing
| this allows iteration. It allows remixing. It allows you
| to inspect what has come before and what it did well and
| where it succeeded and where it fell short and thus what
| you could _add_. It is an enabler of creativity! Thus I
| think it is interesting that GenAI may make it harder to
| have this experience.
| customguy wrote:
| They said they think they would have encountered those
| other games without GenAI, not that they or any of those
| other authors shouldn't have released the game.
| mycocola wrote:
| > why didn't the previous authors, supposedly grass-fed
| genuine checkmark blood-through-their-veins humans didn't
| notice the other 9-8-7-6-5... games, and still released
| their own version?
|
| a) To make it better
|
| b) To learn, in service of a) or another project
| accomplshplihs wrote:
| How is the theft of all human knowledge and the
| destruction of any way of having a meaningful existence a
| huge accomplishment?
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| i had a boss. before he was my boss, he was a friend. he
| took me under his wing, musically speaking. he showed me
| new music. told me what gear he was interested in. we went
| to some gigs.
|
| he used to say "the best artists have the biggest record
| collections".
|
| they've done their research. they developed _taste_.
| they've been in that battle with the unoriginality demon.
| they're still in that battle with the unoriginality demon.
| they're always searching for new. for unexplored. for
| different.
|
| they've also figured out what "good artists copy, great
| artists steal" means.
|
| we take small bits. small ideas. small riffs. we turn them
| into our own. then we repeat that N times to create "a
| song". we borrow. we revere. we obsess. turning lots of
| little differences into a completely new work. yes it's all
| derivative. but derivative originality takes a lot of
| fuckin' effort to get _right_. to be _tasteful_.
|
| this thing isn't _artistic_ stealing, it's the most low-
| effort stealing possible. creativity, originality and more
| importantly _taste_ appear nowhere here.
|
| so, is it bad? depends on your perspective on creative
| endeavours being worthwhile and whether you have _taste_ or
| not i guess.
|
| edit - personally i don't think you can polish a turd. even
| if you rewrite it, the memory lingers.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| Amen!
| bxk76 wrote:
| Just because AI can give you a recipe for an sandwich doesnt
| mean everyone who sells or buys or experiments making
| sandwiches are going to stop.
| ai_fry_ur_brain wrote:
| I think this is false. New ideas are born every minute, and
| llms arent going to help people with those for the most part,
| they'll end up steering you back towards the gradient if you
| do.
| 0xEF wrote:
| Can you give us an example of a new idea that is not
| derivative of something that already exists? Should only
| take about a minute.
|
| Snark aside (and apologies), there's absolutely nothing
| wrong with the "no new ideas" take and nobody should think
| there is. Humans tend to work collectively, try as we might
| to do or appear otherwise, and often come to the same
| conclusions through reasoning and logic. No one-person
| truly invented the light bulb, etc, when really all
| inventive thought is branches of derivative thought as we
| build our collective knowledgebase. A better question would
| be how many novel ideas are the logical conclusion of
| branches of derivative thought and how many are tangential
| brought about by the injection of our irrationally.
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| > a new idea that is not derivative of something that
| already exists? Should only take about a minute.
|
| A child is born every 4.4 seconds. But it took me and my
| girlfriend over 9 months to birth one!
|
| Even if an original idea did show up every minute
| globally, does not mean that it takes only a minute to
| come up with the idea.
| trick-or-treat wrote:
| > it took me and my girlfriend over 9 months to birth
| one!
|
| By my math you should should have at least 2 in that
| time, unless one of you wasn't pulling their weight.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| I don't get your point, so I am going somewhere else:
| twins and triplets
| trick-or-treat wrote:
| So I guess it was a dig on OP not just giving himself
| equal, but top billing somehow, over his girlfriend on
| creating a child.
|
| Wow those 6 seconds you contributed were what made the
| difference, big guy. Not the 9 months of gestation, by
| any means. let's hear it for OP and his splooge everyone,
| and so on. You get the picture.
|
| I'm not sure what's going on exactly with Gen Z males,
| it's an interesting phenomenon. I wouldn't expect that
| kind of dialog from GenX or Boomers even.
| xpct wrote:
| It seems to me that most media genres discover the most
| interesting parts relatively early, then most subsequent work
| is deeply derivative. I feel that way about video games,
| digital music, movies.
|
| I'd wager it's because ideas are simpler to explore
| orthogonally, giving an overview of what's possible.
| Ouman wrote:
| The question is not whether the ingredients are original.
| They almost never are. The question is whether the synthesis
| is any good
| uludag wrote:
| Same thoughts exactly. I personally started looking into indie
| game dev and I've just started to realize how naive I was and
| how hard just game design can be, and that I'll probably never
| be good at it, and that most of my ideas are pretty garbage (or
| incomplete at best).
|
| Even with the perfect AI to write, one would need to iterate
| through many different ideas, play testing constantly, getting
| people to play test and analyze what they found fun and where
| they got stuck. And to get the best ideas you'll need to be
| playing lots of different kinds of games.
| neonstatic wrote:
| Well, "an idea I've had for years" and "something that has
| never been done before" are not the same thing.
| jna_sh wrote:
| This is fair! I am possibly attaching some notion of
| originality to the word "idea" in the context of a project
| that others don't.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| yes you are
| tripledry wrote:
| This is a thought I've had about genAI.
|
| In case it all just comes from training data, "one shotting" a
| game would be more comparable to "git pull" and changing some
| assets than "generating code".
|
| I'm not saying this is how it works, I'm trivializing LLMs with
| this statement, but when I see someone on linkedin excited
| about generating checkers and chess my first thought is "you
| could have done that with git pull for the past 20 years".
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Usually it's an idea somebody had in a flight of fancy or
| inspiration but they haven't really shown much interest in the
| actual medium prior, so they don't really have any knowledge of
| its existence and then they also don't go out of their way to
| confirm if it already exists.
|
| Like I remember in college I had something akin to the idea of
| "50 people 1 question." I was starting to become interested in
| shooting my own documentaries and was particularly interested
| in man on the street style interviews. I pitched it to a friend
| who then told me about 50p1q, which baffled him because it was
| like _the_ hot thing already a year or two prior haha.
|
| Anyway that's just something I think happens a lot. And now
| with genAI people don't throw the idea around even, they
| quickly do a crappy version of the thing, present it, then find
| out it exists. Which isn't terrible I guess but it's one less
| filter for my better or for worse.
| Ouman wrote:
| Most small games are recombinations of existing mechanics
| anyway
| pennomi wrote:
| I'd guess that large games have an even higher percentage of
| pre-existing mechanics than small games do. It's much easier
| to do something experimental if you don't have to wrangle
| investors and entire teams of writers, artists, and
| developers.
| OJFord wrote:
| If OP is anything like me, they probably played it (or saw and
| wanted to play it) on the GBA too, and the memory became an
| idea, forgetting they had actually played it because it did
| exist.
|
| But also, how original can a game idea ever (now) really be -
| there's always going to be things you can describe it as 'like'
| or a mix of, even if not identical. And for such simple things,
| very little room for being non-identical to whatever they're
| like.
| josefrichter wrote:
| It's called Ostrich effect and we all do it. You enjoy toying
| with your own idea so much, that your brain shields you from
| the pain of finding out it already exists. Deep down you _know_
| it probably exists. It 's harmless, unless there's other
| people's time and money involved.
| latexr wrote:
| > You enjoy toying with your own idea so much, that your
| brain shields you from the pain of finding out it already
| exists.
|
| Doesn't look like the author toyed with the idea at all,
| though, apart from having it in their head. Considering how
| they describe themselves (Check the About/Home page), if they
| had toyed with it at all they would have already built it.
|
| I also don't see why finding out it exists would be
| "painful". The game is free and the author didn't experiment
| or learn anything from building it, they just prompted it in
| one go.
| versteegen wrote:
| I think you misunderstand what was meant by "toying with
| your own idea" here. I interpret it as daydreaming about
| it.
| latexr wrote:
| > I interpret it as daydreaming about it.
|
| Which is why I said:
|
| > apart from having it in their head.
|
| But if that's all you're doing, there's no "pain" from
| finding out it exists. On the contrary, there is plenty
| of room for joy.
| josefrichter wrote:
| Yeah "toying" as in "entertaining the idea" in any form or
| shape.
|
| And I disagree that the author didn't get anything from it.
| There's a ton to glean, it was probably fun, and many HN
| readers enjoyed the post.
| latexr wrote:
| > And I disagree that the author didn't get anything from
| it.
|
| Those were not my words. Clearly they got a game out of
| it. What I said was they:
|
| > didn't experiment or learn anything from building it
|
| Which is unambiguously true. There was no experimentation
| and no learning. There was one prompt and one result.
|
| > and many HN readers enjoyed the post.
|
| That's entirely orthogonal.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| 90% of everything is crap according to the late SF write
| Theodore Sturgeon. That was true before AI and it remains true
| presently. Does it really matter whether this game was in the
| training data or not here? I guess if one is trying to assert
| it can build original ideas (and it can, I've done it), but it
| seems like this is the equivalent of pulling something from
| Stack Overflow and customizing it given the description of the
| problem.
|
| IMO the ability to describe a game and let the AI implement a
| PoC is pretty wild. It's a signal as to whether such an idea is
| worth pursuing further to me rather than a finished product.
| And I am enjoying all the experimentation with existing genres
| as well as the occasional truly original experience due to the
| dramatically lower cost of entry. What these efforts lack
| currently is the playtesting and polish that is hard without a
| human in the loop. So much like agentic engineering, the
| productive work is in being a centaur. It surprises me how much
| pushback this is getting from the demographic that embraced the
| relatively inscrutable git over simpler alternatives for small
| teams along with the tower of Babel of equally inscrutable
| frameworks and APIs.
|
| It's not unlike Martin Scorsese admitting upfront he's using
| GenAI as a creative tool to visualize scenes for his scripts.
| The predictable backlash that he dare use AI in any way for any
| aspect of his craft despite his irrefutable oeuvre is a sign of
| the times more than a legitimate objection to me. Ask the users
| of deviantArt to stop working with Photoshop and see how that
| goes.
|
| Having worked in the game industry in the past and adjacent to
| Hollywood over my career, they were already top heavy
| exploitative cultures before AI. And any auteur that thinks
| they can replace humans with agents is as tuned in to GenAI as
| the tech CEOs and VCs that happily announced layoffs and
| instituted tokenmaxxing benchmarks to measure the "incredible"
| boost in productivity AI enables.
|
| So my question, ahead of the mandatory downvotes for not
| chanting along with the torch-bearing mob against AI in every
| way is: beyond the CapEx and the buildout issues (both legit
| IMO), how is AI impacting you negatively and personally?
| jna_sh wrote:
| You are the second person to respond to my question that's
| entirely orthogonal to the actual AI usage here with a very
| self-conscious screed. Go read my responses to the first one
| :)
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| If you're going to go orthogonal to the AI yourself, what
| makes you think other people won't go orthogonal to your
| own screed?
|
| I'm happy to assume the guy had the idea in his head for
| years. That others did too should come as no surprise. We
| are all a lot more alike than most people acknowledge. And
| this seems the credible successor to Activision's stampede
| from the late 1970s. Happy?
| besterman23 wrote:
| I believe that AI is not a signal of all white collar jobs
| being replaced, it's a signal that SWE was in its own bubble
| and this is the pressure to pop it.
|
| Most software is not needed, YCombinator itself works on the
| philosophy of "maybe 2/300 ideas are good" and even among those
| their biggest hitters were social media platforms and
| undercutting existing services using VC money.
|
| It was a big game that didn't make a lot of sense in
| retrospect, and now with these AI super coders it just doesn't
| make sense faster.
|
| Software ate the world, and AI is the garbage disposal meant to
| chew up the leftovers.
| warmedcookie wrote:
| I played it in Twilight Princess and I did not have fun and
| Link probably didn't either.
| hbarka wrote:
| That's one tired sheepdog.
| vnglst wrote:
| This was my second attempt, I'm still learning! Besides, the
| wolf was freaking me out.
| defrost wrote:
| Always fun having a go, mind you Michael Nyman had some
| thoughts on all this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xn1_vUe_Vws
|
| For interest, some shepherds run two dogs, each on a
| different whistle or voice command pitch.
| tbreschi wrote:
| Brilliant marketing here in the title
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Looks kinda like "Sheepherds" which came out recently.
|
| However as others have pointed out the idea is a common one,
| probably because many people are exposed to sheep and sheep dogs
| and farming. Which further reinforces a previous point I made
| that all human work is derivative and barely anything actually
| original.
|
| But that's why it doesn't matter! Make that game/app/website that
| someone else has made before, make your own interpretation! The
| beauty and uniqueness is in the skin not the flesh!
| totetsu wrote:
| I'm sure I saw a blog post about this same mechanic being made
| by llms back a year or so ago too
| totetsu wrote:
| Well it was the same person at least
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43360648
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43298945
| zkry wrote:
| But isn't getting an LLM to n-shot something just going to
| produce non-unique, non-original interpretations of an idea?
| stephbook wrote:
| Playing on iphone13 mini.
|
| It instructs me to rotate my phone. The pasture doesn't get any
| bigger, but now the top bar blocks half the screen. The tooltip
| about rotating stays in the middle of the screen. Unplayable.
| There's a music note indicating sound, but I never heard the dog
| bark.
|
| It's exactly the kind of unpolished slop I expected it to be.
| thih9 wrote:
| The article's title seems needlessly dramatic, the article itself
| doesn't reference the LLM's danger.
|
| The title could have been just "Shepherd's Dog: A game by Fable
| 5".
| vnglst wrote:
| Not sure if it would've gone to the front page of Hackernews
| with that title! I was also trying to make a little fun about
| the drama around Mythos/Fable: Even though Fable did this
| really well, to me it does not appear to be fundamentally
| different from other top models.
| dakolli wrote:
| Yeah, fundamentally the same: Worthless.
| hurtigioll wrote:
| funny how a worthless LLM belongs to the fastest revenue
| growing company in the history of Capitalism
| ps3udo wrote:
| Can you provide any source for that claim? Thanks!
| hurtigioll wrote:
| google it. this article from one month ago is already
| obsolete, annualized revenue grew from 30 bln to 44 bln
| in the last month
|
| https://venturebeat.com/technology/anthropic-says-it-
| hit-a-3...
| techpression wrote:
| Because others are paying for it. It's a lot easier to
| get revenue when you don't have to care about CAC or
| paying the bills.
| perching_aix wrote:
| Bit of a funny thing to so proudly assert in your millionth
| "your favorite show is shit" type comment, don't you agree?
|
| In close lockstep with @ai_fry_your_brain, who at least
| makes it clear right on the tin that they're not here to
| engage in any earnest capacity whatsoever. Always a mixed
| feeling between being appreciative of that, and finding it
| blatant.
|
| Good thing it's AI ruining communities, a thought I have no
| doubt you also share in. If only people properly recognized
| the hard work of people like you in this.
| ciscoriordan wrote:
| My Belgian Tervuren and I have a basic herding title and about 4
| years of herding experience.
|
| The sheep movement is excellent. You could make it even more
| realistic by having them favor lusher areas and by having one
| occasionally bolt spastically (hard mode?)
|
| A handler mode where you play as a human and shout commands at
| the dog could be cool too!
| disillusioned wrote:
| Come by!
| entropie wrote:
| > My Belgian Tervuren and I have a basic herding title and
| about 4 years of herding experience.
|
| Do you happen to have any videos of a Tervuren doing actual
| herding work or competing in herding trials?
|
| I was apparently under the wrong impression that Tervurens are
| no longer bred for herding. My girlfriend just told me that
| there are still dedicated herding lines, but when I started
| looking into it, I could hardly find any footage. Compared to
| the thousands of videos of Border Collies working stock, there
| seems to be very little material available.
|
| I'd also be interested to hear more about what your dogs are
| like. Are they from a specialized herding line?
|
| Do you see them as being closer to the typical working Malinois
| - very intense, high-drive dogs with a strong prey focus - or
| more like a blend of the classic German Shepherd and Border
| Collie traits?
|
| The latter type, at least in my experience, can make excellent
| everyday companions as long as their owners know what they're
| doing and provide enough mental and physical stimulation.
|
| The reason I'm asking is that I've been considering getting
| another Malinois. I used to own a fourth-hand Belgian Shepherd
| who eventually turned into a reasonably good everyday
| companion, but it was a long and sometimes difficult road.
| There were also certain situations where he could never really
| be trusted.
|
| He also had a habit of finishing arguments that my Pointer
| started in a very Malinois-like fashion, while my Pointer was
| generally too stupid(and proud) to learn anything from _that_
| experience.
|
| Feel free to write a wall of text if you feel like it.
| nickandbro wrote:
| I sure do miss Fable. It just knew how to do things and do them
| well. Sad it's now blocked.
| willtemperley wrote:
| I wonder if this is the real problem: it was too good, and a
| lobby of companies feeling threatened by the competition
| decided to push the jailbreak narrative as a scapegoat.
| evilturnip wrote:
| I think it's impressive that an LLM can take you to a local
| maxima in one-shot.
|
| But once you start maintaining it, improving it and fixing bugs,
| you'll eventually need to rip it apart and put it back together
| again while understanding how it all works.
|
| This is why I think the better approach isn't to one-shot but to
| have the architecture in your head and build it up piece by
| piece, with the AI accelerating the code writing.
| dools wrote:
| I've found it very easy to maintain, add features to and fix
| bugs in software I've written entirely with LLMs, and in
| languages and frameworks with which I'm unfamiliar. You just
| ask the LLM to explain the code and then work with it to come
| up with the fix.
| ai_fry_ur_brain wrote:
| How big are those projects.. I dont think this is good for
| your mental health or physicaly your brains health. Problem
| solving keeps your brain strong. The laziness in us is
| inclined to take shortcuts, don't do it. Its like driving
| your car 3 blocks instead of walking, your physical health
| will suffer.
| dools wrote:
| > How big are those projects
|
| Define big I guess. They're non-trivial, mix of internal
| enterprise tools, a multiplatform app
| (android/ios/mac/windows/web currently headbutting its way
| through review), including a billing system for my small
| telecommunications business.
|
| > I dont think this is good for your mental health or
| physicaly your brains health
|
| I find the experience of doing it without writing the code
| to be intellectually pretty similar. I still solve a lot of
| problems, the LLM couldn't, for example, one shot the event
| sourcing model I built for synching data between devices.
| It took quite a few iterations and I had to define a lot of
| the architecture, but I did it at a level that wasn't "here
| is a class, here is a module, this module does XYZ", more
| at the "whitepaper" level or describing how specific bits
| of the app needed to work in order to solve some problem.
|
| It's also very similar to managing other developers.
|
| > Its like driving your car 3 blocks instead of walking,
| your physical health will suffer
|
| It's more similar to having staff rather than doing
| everything yourself. The problem solving just shifts to a
| different area, and you get more done.
| matwood wrote:
| > Problem solving keeps your brain strong.
|
| Coding is not the sole problem solving skill. In fact,
| coding may be one of the easier skills much of the time.
| Deciding what to build, where to focus efforts,
| understanding a customer's needs, could all be just as if
| not more challenging than the coding part.
| dools wrote:
| Also what the code should do and how it should do it.
| LLMs regularly cannot come up with the best way to
| approach something. Once those decisions are made,
| codifying them is kind of the least interesting part of
| the entire exercise.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| > Its like driving your car 3 blocks instead of walking,
| your physical health will suffer.
|
| And be sure to only walk barefoot. Relying on artificial
| shoes weakens the muscles and the skin of your feet.
| mycocola wrote:
| A reasonable compromise in the face of frostbite and
| hookworm.
|
| I suppose critical thinking skills are also as bad,
| making you question the state of the world. Problem
| solving is another one, deluding one into believing there
| are solutions to suffering.
| jounker wrote:
| Sarcasm aside, most shoes are pretty bad for your feet.
| yogthos wrote:
| I've been working on a project that's over 150k loc of Rust
| at this point. https://dirge-code.github.io
|
| You absolutely can have the LLM write maintainable code. A
| few tricks I use are to ask it to plan out features in
| phases, and then do a branch and a PR for each focused
| piece of work. It makes it a lot easier to review and
| understand what's happening.
|
| I also ended up making a tool which lets the LLM get a high
| level perspective of the codebase, and then see parts that
| are structurally gnarly. I've been using it to do refactors
| and clean things up periodically. It helped a lot with
| keeping the architecture clean.
|
| https://github.com/yogthos/wavescope-mcp
|
| Adding features and evolving the codebase has not been a
| problem even at this scale.
| hurtigioll wrote:
| LLMs are good now at looking at existing project and suggesting
| big refactors for technical debt removal and new better
| architectures after the project grew organically for a while
| MrScruff wrote:
| I think this is true for projects beyond a certain complexity.
| I have 100% vibe coded projects with tens of thousands LOC, and
| haven't seen any real issues with fully automated maintenance.
| Will that approach work in every scenario, absolutely not, but
| the size and complexity of projects where it does is growing
| with each new model release.
| rahulmax wrote:
| Strongly agree, well said. The one-shot is sexy purely because
| that first demo is so impressive. Going from zero to working
| app in minutes.
|
| Like you said, working and maintainable are very different
| things. One-shot hits a wall the moment you need to do anything
| non-trivial after the initial generation. Bug fixing is
| extremely hard, even with AI assistance. Same with feature
| additions. It's pretty much black box at this point on. AI that
| wrote it now goes in loops wasting tokens without being able to
| can't reliably fix it either, because it has no memory of the
| architectural decisions it made (or didn't make, for that
| matter) the first time round.
|
| What I realized is that the failure here is the absence of a
| shared mental model between you and the code.
|
| I'm a product designer with average front-end know-how, and a
| solid understanding on HTML/CSS and how the web works, coming
| from the era of hand-coding html/css files. After vibe-coding a
| few products early this year, purely to learn how AI works, how
| to design AI interaction patterns etc., I built something
| called Intent Model. (largely inspired by SDD / BDD.
|
| Intent model is a structured, typed artifact (basically a JSON
| contract) that captures actors, entities, journeys, rules, and
| constraints before I write (or make the AI write) any code. It
| sits upstream of everything. Think of it like a condensed,
| strict distillation of your PRD / BRD / requiremnt doc.
|
| When you hand the AI a well-defined intent file instead of a
| vague brief, this one-shot becomes structured and bound by
| rules. Now you're giving it an architecture and to conform to.
| You define (or make the AI define) the precise variable names,
| their types, lifecycle, user roles, responsibilities, business
| rules and constraints in the file. Every generated artifact can
| trace back to a decision you made deliberately, reviewd and
| signed-off.
|
| In the design world, we already do this by using design tokens.
| We can tell the AI that it needs to strictly use design tokens
| and not use stray properties like a hex color value or raw
| values not defined in the token contract. This is easily
| auditable by AI as well.
|
| The result is you can still move absurdly fast and still
| maintain the understanding, which the one-shot approach throws
| away. This way, you know why every piece exists because you
| defined the intent before the AI implementated it.
|
| AI is the accelerant, and you're the architect. The intent is
| the blueprint you generate to guide/harness the AI.
|
| The best part is, once you have an intent contract at the heart
| of your project, it becomes impossible to break things too,
| logically or experience-wise.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| > you'll eventually need to rip it apart and put it back
| together again while understanding how it all works.
|
| This is what spec .md files are for, skill issue
| systemsweird wrote:
| Exactly this! People think the one shot gets them to 95%
| complete on an implementation of their vision. Issue is, it
| actually gets you the AIs vision adjacent to what you want, and
| coercing that into the actual implementation you want is now
| 95% of the work.
|
| This is really no different from working with humans. A
| visionary founder has to spend tremendous effort to get their
| engineers to will a vision into existence. This will be the key
| skill with AI.
| CarRamrod wrote:
| BAA VRAM EWE
| wg0 wrote:
| Now next game - The Boy who cried wolf! Wolf!
| ai_fry_ur_brain wrote:
| Forces me to rotate to get warning message to disappear (works
| fine on portrait, but regardless forces me to play with two
| hands..), when rotate doesnt even fit on phone.
|
| fROnTEnD DeV Is DeAd
|
| DeSiGN Is DeAD
|
| Cool idea tho, could be a fun game if if the UX wasnt so hostile.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| "a game idea I've had for years"
|
| Bruv, there are already countless games with this exact
| mechanic...
| chvid wrote:
| As far as I can tell it is possible to get this sort of quality
| game with a properly tuned harness out of one of the cheaper
| models.
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| In which harness?
| andrepd wrote:
| He should ask AI to tell him that #aaa text on #eee background is
| not acceptable.
| ernst_klim wrote:
| When you say EUR20 worth of tokens is it fair direct API call
| price or subsidized claude code?
| vnglst wrote:
| Direct API access I'm afraid, it was not my intention to spent
| it all in one go on this. But after 12EUR I didn't want to stop
| anymore
| bloomark wrote:
| > It's really fun and exactly how I imagined it.
|
| If this is what you imagined, you need to imagine better.
|
| * Pathfinding is terrible (if I end up inside the fenced area
| clicking outside doesn't lead me out). * Forcing me to go
| landscape while not even filling the entire screen is terrible
| (where did you even test this). * Controls are disastrous (I'm
| either barking all the time or a bark makes my sprite ignore my
| movements).
|
| You one-shotted this, and I will admit it's incredible that these
| agents can create something like this in minutes.
|
| But your statements along with the "most dangerous AI model" in
| the title are disingenuous. Please do better.
| _pdp_ wrote:
| If you sit down and write that game by hand you will not only
| finish it in a week but also learn a lot of things along the way
| and perhaps even discover something about the game and you did
| not imagine. That is how programming works. It is a search
| problem.
|
| Also this is a game has very simple mechanics I am sure you can
| generate as easily with Cursor or some other tools.
| thih9 wrote:
| Cursor has access to the latest models so it should be
| equivalent, right?
|
| Or is there some other AI usage described in this article that
| is not supported by cursor?
| _pdp_ wrote:
| I don't use Cursor so I mentioned it as slightly impartial
| suggestion but my point is broader. I hear and have seen
| results from others using Composer 2.5 which is only
| available in Cursor.
| pnut wrote:
| More deeply than programming being a search problem,
| programming is a means to an end.
|
| If the end is a combination of education and product discovery,
| then yeah maybe, although those are also dimensions of personal
| productivity that can be amplified by leveraging AI tools.
|
| If the end goals of programming is leveraging computer
| automation, then nobody actually cares how the automation
| infrastructure gets established, and the less distractions with
| low value implementation complexity, the better.
| momocowcow wrote:
| So it created a trivial game that a teenager could've built as a
| part-time project while acquiring deep knowledge.
| Levitating wrote:
| Humans can do lots of things, I don't see how that's relevant.
| This post is about AI progress.
| da-x wrote:
| Curious enough, I tried the same prompt with Qwen3.6-27B.
|
| One shot produced a game with no sheeps. I had to told it to fix
| two bugs then.
|
| Overall, the graphics and games seems good enough and better than
| most of the closed models that were shown. However, not
| surprisingly, falls short of Fable.
|
| I've put the index.html and open code session here:
|
| https://github.com/da-x/when-ai-fails/tree/qwen3.6-27b/shepa...
| vnglst wrote:
| Would love a PR with this!
| raincole wrote:
| There were dozens (if not hundreds) of more complex games made by
| Fable on Twitter the first day it was released. The only reason
| this is on HN frontpage is the stupid clickbait title.
|
| Some random examples:
|
| https://x.com/fe_yukichi/status/2064635098411180374
| https://x.com/akiraxtwo/status/2064780732082651402
| https://x.com/kieradev/status/2064482704763085202
| https://x.com/VincentLogic/status/2064699740936356065
| https://x.com/XiaohuiAI666/status/2064994538591223911
| franze wrote:
| No, the reason is that it is a follow up on a (multiple)
| threads march last year and shows the progress of ai.
| GuestFAUniverse wrote:
| (Exaggerated:) Guy who would never pay 20EUR to another dev for
| such a game, pays same amount for AI.
|
| Applause to Anthropic: mission accomplished!
| ashdnazg wrote:
| That's no surprise, telling the AI what to do is basically the
| IKEA effect.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
| djeastm wrote:
| There's always been a premium paid for custom work, though. OP
| just paid off-the-rack prices for a custom-made suit.
| Ouman wrote:
| The "world's most dangerous AI" framing is funny here because the
| result is basically the least dystopian use case imaginable
| rcarmo wrote:
| Pretty great game, am having some fun
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| ok, after playing this game, I started respecting shepherding
| dogs' skills even more.
| shmoil wrote:
| Yeah, but can it one-shot Sven Bomwollen?
| djmips wrote:
| 2002 - a strange game!
| deadbabe wrote:
| It's sad that someone can think about a game for years and never
| really spend the time to just build it out. This is a very simple
| game even a CS student could build for an assignment. But now
| we're supposed to be impressed an AI can one shot it for $20
| dollars.
| helterskelter wrote:
| This game need a "bah-ram-ewe" cheat code where the sheep dog
| turns into a well-mannered pig who politely asks the sheep to
| return to their pen.
| root-parent wrote:
| But all this was in the training data no?
|
| https://github.com/Nuno1123/chaser https://github.com/tee-
| lab/collective-responses-of-flocking-...
| https://shoze.itch.io/sheep-game
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/3006280/Sheepherds/
| https://ameiswhattodo.itch.io/sheepy
| ofjcihen wrote:
| Oh wow, this is just a straight ripoff of that last one isn't
| it?
|
| I feel like this is a recurring theme. Someone posts about one
| shotting something and then it's revealed that you could also
| have one-shot it buy git cloning the repo it's based off of
| deadbabe wrote:
| The real point of these posts is karma farming. Posting a
| good one shot is worth at least a hundred or so upvotes.
| People need to recognize this for what it is and ignore these
| kind of things.
| weirdhacker42 wrote:
| What can I buy with all of my karma?
| ocodo wrote:
| while the common refrain is nothing, what you get with
| karma is a v.small online recognition boost.
|
| so almost but not quite nothing.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Karma is the only thing you take with you when you die.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| Oddly, I wonder if this is not a great benchmarking prompt.
| andai wrote:
| 45 minutes and $20 ? You can make it in 5 minutes with DeepSeek!
|
| I even did it for free in their web chat.
|
| https://jsbin.com/sigesemeyi/edit?html,output
|
| DeepSeek Flash was also able to do it, even with reasoning
| disabled, but Pro gave much nicer graphics.
|
| Your Fable version is prettier though!
|
| Edit: And has better gameplay. And sounds. OK, nevermind! Fable
| wins this one :)
| jm_l wrote:
| In this version, the sheep all get stuck in the corners and
| edges. This doesn't happen in the Fable version.
| andai wrote:
| The Fable version has some kind of "gravity" that pulls the
| sheep together.
|
| Some of the other games mentioned here use fancier flocking
| mechanics (like boids!)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48518518
| pixelesque wrote:
| Love the:
|
| > // Sky-like background
|
| comment for the ground! :) No doubt most of the training data
| is for sky...
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