I'm helping my dog vibe code games

https://www.calebleak.com/posts/dog-game/

by cleak • 5 months ago

1106 370 5 months ago

calebleak.com

namuol• 5 months ago

Nobody cared when I taught my roulette wheel to vibe code :/

selridge2• 5 months ago

STREAM THIS

DANmode• 5 months ago

Better content than most streamers!

worldsayshi• 5 months ago

Does it have personality?

bigbuppo2• 5 months ago

No, but it rarely shits on the carpet.

nine_k2• 5 months ago

Dogs are smart; maybe they are smart enough for vibe-coding if we give them adequate input controls?

But the whole setup reminds me about his blast from the past, when a yucca plant was trading stocks, rewarded by water: https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/26/business/investing-diary-...

wigster2• 5 months ago

goodbye cruel world

jama2118• 5 months ago

Oh come on, what I see here is whimsy and human creativity! Amazing work by OP

wigster2• 5 months ago

You are, of course, correct. I hadn't even read the article tbh. The vibe word is just causing me to spasm these days. ;-)

keybored• 5 months ago

It’s a rube goldberg machine with a mascot.

With a morale of the story.

If there’s a takeaway beyond the spectacle, it’s this: the bottleneck in AI-assisted development isn’t the quality of your ideas - it’s the quality of your feedback loops.

It’s not this - it’s that.

The shit future comes in many packages.

InMice2• 5 months ago

woofwoof

shervinafshar• 5 months ago

Love it. No Infinite Cavapoo Theorem needed. Give Momo a week and she'll have DOOM running on her treat dispenser.

Betelbuddy• 5 months ago

In the world of vide coding agents, nobody knows you are a human...

djrz• 5 months ago

The future is so disappointing.

jama2118• 5 months ago

What, people like OP doing incredibly creative and whimsical projects like this?

stoneforger• 5 months ago

Who is this helping? What is creative about using their dog as a lava lamp?

wiseowise• 5 months ago

Yes. Hyperscalers promised AI and singularity, instead we got millions of programmers on the chopping block, scammers having a field day generating hyper realistic shit (trump playing hokey, anyone?), and projects like these.

xantronix2• 5 months ago

Serious question, outside of the Bay Area, are there therapists whose specialty is in catering to the needs and concerns of developers? Obviously AI therapy is not a serious suggestion here. This is going to be a burgeoning corner of the practice at the US' current trajectory.

jama2118• 5 months ago

If it is it shouldn’t be. There are more important needs for mental health support right now

block_dagger• 5 months ago

A thousand dogs typing on a thousand typewriters...

avaer2• 5 months ago

This seems like a good way to get a feel for a coding model. It's like the images you get out of a diffusion model when fed an empty prompt.

cleak10• 5 months ago

It does. Claude seems to do the best with this prompt. Codex 5.2 struggled with UID generation and kept ending its turn with things like "And now you're all setup to run tests!" without actually running them. A better (and shorter) prompt could probably get a lot out of Codex.

wseqyrku• 5 months ago

Thought this is quoting Karpathy for a second there

xg15• 5 months ago

snrf99777655;;+%hn

Dwedit• 5 months ago

What is this? Did the quadratic formula explode?

1234letshaveatw• 5 months ago

bad dog

oulipo2• 5 months ago

Yet the only thing the dog wanted was a cuddle and a frisbee

krapp2• 5 months ago

yeah that's capitalism for you. No treats until you provide value.

jpadkins• 5 months ago

Amazing. Also very thankful the author included his setup on GitHub. Also the YouTube video is fun to watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BbPlPou3Bg

masijo• 5 months ago

And the most HN title award goes to...

jama2118• 5 months ago

Incredible

bogzz3• 5 months ago

How did this get to the top of the frontpage?

PunchyHamster2• 5 months ago

By nonexistence of downvote feature

w4yai• 5 months ago

It's funny? I liked it.

bogzz3• 5 months ago

Funny is subjective, I should just have moved on and ignored this but I couldn't help myself, this is so irritating.

It's a prompt that makes an LLM turn iuqefxygn9urg0fh1 into a little Godot game. It's like a slot machine with no payoff, and the dog component is slapped on top of it and makes no difference whatsoever in the project.

tabs_or_spaces2• 5 months ago

It has vibe code and dogs in the title

agateau• 5 months ago

Most LLM articles depress me. At least this one made me smile, even if it's more about turning a dog into a random generator and generating games from random input.

alan_sass• 5 months ago

this is incredible. we need more projects like this in the world!

sho_hn2• 5 months ago

Although I would recommend a more sturdy dog breed, for when the angry mob that can't buy RAM sticks and SSDs this year shows up at the front gate.

InMice2• 5 months ago

From everyone needs to "Learn to code" to "Just have your dog vibe code it"

PunchyHamster2• 5 months ago

Better figure out how to replace management and HR dept with dogs

notxorand• 5 months ago

gonna be good stuff tho. dogs are mostly lovelier

ilaksh2• 5 months ago

It's actually extremely similar: the agent has to figure out a way to associate the next logical steps with the (often disconnected or nonsensical) directives the executive gave them.

It might be a little easier with a dog though. With a dog, you just give it treats and it doesn't care how you interpret what it typed.

jjk1662• 5 months ago

Pretty sure just a drop in replacement would be an immediate improvement.

koolba• 5 months ago

The next round of massive tech layoffs will be ruff.

sho_hn2• 5 months ago

I for one am all in on DiL (Dog in the Loop) engineering.

oxag3n• 5 months ago

Reminded me an old joke about Bill Gates from late 90s:

"One coder got an insight that Bill Gates builds his products by typing with his butt, compiling and delivering it.

The coder typed for 20 minutes like that, compiled, ran, and got an output:

Only Bill Gates can code like this."

Not a joke anymore.

selridge2• 5 months ago

Wasn’t much of a joke then, from the looks of it.

cheeseomlit• 5 months ago

'Ewe Heard Me!' reminds of that looney toons sheep raider game on ps1. And it's exactly the kind of game I'd expect a dog to make

kketch• 5 months ago

Really amazing work, congrats!

with• 5 months ago

the real takeaway is buried at the bottom: "the magic isn't in the input, it's in the system around it." random keystrokes producing playable games means the input barely matters anymore. we're basically at the point where the engineering is in the scaffolding, not the prompting.

ajspig1• 5 months ago

+ Also the fact that the Memory.md file was a hindrance to the quality of output

cezart• 5 months ago

Depends on the desired output. The author wanted variability, for which Memory.md was an obstacle. Another project might need consistency.

otabdeveloper42• 5 months ago

the engineering is in the scaffolding, not the prompting

Well, yes. Feeding random tokens as prompts until something good comes out is a valid strategy.

yoyohello13• 5 months ago

Simulated annealing for game design

cardanome3• 5 months ago

Not that I condone any form of gambling but I would rather play actual slot machines instead of spending hundreds of dollars on tokens in hopes that the AI blesses me with anything useful.

avaer2• 5 months ago

we're basically at the point where the engineering is in the scaffolding, not the prompting.

This still required prompting, and not from the dog. Engineering is still the holistic practice of engineering.

cardanome3• 5 months ago

That also shows the delusion of some people that believe their vibe coded projects have any value.

If generative AI improves at the rate that is promised then all your "promting skills" or whatever you believe you had will be obsolete. You might think you will be an "AI engineer" or whatever and that it is other people that will lose their job, that you are safe because you have the magic skills to use the new tech. You believe the tech overlords will reward you for your faith.

Nope. You are just training your replacement.

No one will buy your game that you vibe coded. If the tech were good enough to create games that are actually fun then they would just generate their own games. Oh your skill? Yeah, a dog can do it.

Yes people will cope by saying but oh the whole initial prompt and setting it all up was still hard but yeah currently. The tech will improve and it will get more accessible. So enjoy the few months you are still relevant.

Of course there is reason to believe that you can't scale up LLMs endlessly and bigger models hit diminishing returns. In fact we might already be seeing this. So there is an upside but then again when the AI bubble pops and the economy crashes you will be out of a job all the same.

mikkupikku10• 5 months ago

Sounds great to me. Software devs might lose their jobs but billions of people will be empowered to spin up whatever software they need on demand. This is the future I dreamed of when I was a kid, and I'm not so cynical as to let the dying of a trade sour me to this objectively incredible technology.

testaccount282• 5 months ago

this would be a more insightful comment if the output wasn't itch io shovelware.

wazHFsRy2• 5 months ago

I think this misses something. The output here is something not the thing. Yes the scaffolding is important, but the requirements are even more important. You need crystal clear requirements + great scaffolding and then the implementation becomes mechanical.

azeirah• 5 months ago

Sorry but what do you mean crystal clear requirements?

I don't particularly think "y7u8888888ftrg34BC" would pass as a crystal clear requirement at my workplace :<

Do you mean something different?

krupan2• 5 months ago

This is amazing because it's the same logic and argument about how to do good software engineering that's been around for 40 years. If you just write good enough requirements, a good enough, detailed specification, then your software team can't fail, even if they are low-cost engineers from a developing nation. It's the classic Waterfall method.

That was totally upended by agile, that emphasized that yes, a clear, unambiguous specification is needed, and the best language for that is a programming language. Don't waste time writing a detailed spec in English, get right to writing it in code that you can execute and get immediate feedback on.

Now people want LLMs to write the code for them, so they are back to saying we just need to give the LLMs clear enough direction, a clear specification. It's amazing to witness history not exactly repeat itself, but very clearly rhyming

randomtoast• 5 months ago

the magic isn't in the input, it's in the system around it.

It isn't [this], it's [that]. Is AI slop, just saying.

visarga2• 5 months ago

You can automate Momo with a rng.

Windchaser2• 5 months ago

can you automate love, visarga?

visarga2• 5 months ago

Not with bare rng

4b11b4• 5 months ago

lol yes "some game designer who only speaks in a cryptic language" . And frankly, I bet this helped build some intuition on dealing with LLM/agent/harness/etc in some strange way that wouldn't have otherwise happened

kseniamorph• 5 months ago

meanwhile cats: https://socradar.io/blog/dark-web-profile-blackcat-alphv/

oytis• 5 months ago

It has to be satire. Cute dog though

jimhi• 5 months ago

Oddly relevant for my multiyear project on getting my dog to vibe code b2b saas products https://dogomation.darefail.com/

cleak10• 5 months ago

Pretty neat! I actually ran across that right before publishing - I didn't want to see what was around until after I had the whole thing locked in. I love the novel input!

gnatman• 5 months ago

> On January 13th, I woke up to the news that Meta had another round of layoffs and my role specifically as a research engineer had been eliminated.

Not even 10x dog programmers are surviving in this economy

pixelpoet2• 5 months ago

Who's a good software developer? [scritches]

dustycyanide• 5 months ago

hilarious, I'm in the office and had to try pretty hard not to laugh out loud

pixelpoet2• 5 months ago

My goodness, finished all your Jira tickets early this week huh? That's a good boy! [fuzzy scritches and wharrgarbling intensifies]

Honestly I wouldn't mind a bit of that now and then myself, but I guess stable employment will have to do. Or is that only for the vibecoding horses?

KolibriFly5• 5 months ago

Momo is. Yes, she is ahahah

kaicianflone• 5 months ago

Go Momo go! If you want to hook up multiple dogs and have them reach consensus I'm down. I have a 15 lb havapoo I can volunteer ( he needs to help with rent )

chipheat• 5 months ago

Could this be done better with one of those dog button mats? The concept is interesting, but, it mostly just seems like an AI trying to interpret keyspam.

funkyfiddler3692• 5 months ago

like an AI trying to interpret keyspam

'nuff to run most governments nowadays (Europe and US come to mind. 2026 and they have the Space Programs of DIY youtubers with money, whaaaat) so why wouldn't it help a dog helping his dog vibing game(s)?

Windchaser2• 5 months ago

mostly just seems like an AI trying to interpret keyspam.

aye, but the whimsy is the point!

anigbrowl• 5 months ago

Yes, I was hoping for a system where Claude was informed it was communicating with an unusually intelligent dog whose ability to communicate was limited by dog anatomy, and that the AI would not to hold the dog's interest with its output.

cleak10• 5 months ago

Both my dogs have actually learned to use the button mats. Down selecting to the right responses seemed tricky. My wife also took away the mat since Hana (the larger one) never learned "all done" and would paw at the "walk" button until she got it out and carried it around.

blibble2• 5 months ago

love the article

slightly concerned tomorrow morning's top HN story will be karparthy telling us how dog-based LLM interfaces are the way of the future

and you'll be left behind if you don't get in now

(and then next week my boss will be demanding I do it)

heliumtera• 5 months ago

Please, be real.

There will be a Simon Wilison submission linking to his blog linking to karpathy xit. You know, the usual good stuff.

xantronix2• 5 months ago

Have you any idea what you have just done? You have uttered his name and now he has been summoned. You have doomed us all.

nine_k2• 5 months ago

Everybody and their dog will be doing it. Actually, the dog will be in charge. Dogs are loyal, enthusiastic, and require less office space. With their endless desire to play and to please, they will take over the game development industry.

In the meantime, the financial industry will be taken over by cats.

krsw• 5 months ago

They also don't take 20 years to become smart like pesky resource-exhausting humans. I bet you could be up and running from a pup in 10-20 months.

jjk1662• 5 months ago

In the meantime, the financial industry will be taken over by cats.

Cats would certainly be less flummoxed by stock values suddenly plummeting; they may even enjoy knocking them over.

freakynit2• 5 months ago

Beavers will control construction and infrastructure... building dams, bridges, and entire housing developments with zero corruption.

dadrock• 5 months ago

The world is not ready for BarkGPT.

DrewADesign5• 5 months ago

CatGPT would be cool but when you really wanted to chat, it would just ignore you.

hrpnk• 5 months ago

Looking for the headline about "dogs replacing engineers"...

luxuryballs• 5 months ago

I’m not ok with robots replacing people but dogs replacing people? now you’ve got my attention

AlphaAndOmega0• 5 months ago

The programming workspace of the future of the future will have three employees:

A man, a dog and an instance of Claude.

The dog writes the prompts for Claude, the man feeds the dog, and the dog stops the man from turning off the computer.

CobrastanJorji• 5 months ago

You're right. They did it. The old man and dog joke has been realized, but the real answer of the future turned out to be: "the dog programs the game, and the man feeds the treat hopper."

justinnk• 5 months ago

Thank you for the good laugh! This whole thread is peak satire. Although, be careful. It reminds me of the foreword to a shortstory someone shared on HN recently: „[…] Read it and laugh, because it is very funny, and at the moment it is satire. If you’re still around forty years from now, do the existing societal equivalent of reading it again, and you may find yourself laughing out of the other side of your mouth (remember mouths?). It will probably be much too conservative.“ — https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___...

freakynit2• 5 months ago

That was funny. Gave me good laugh. Thanks..

i7l• 5 months ago

CODEOWNERS will be replaced by the usual means of marking territory. Let's hope our laptops are liquid-proof.

skyberrys• 5 months ago

The funniest thing here is that you think you will still have a boss next week. They can just hire the dog now!

ljm• 5 months ago

Some dude vibe codes OpenPaw and gives credit to his XL Bully called Threadripper that would never hurt another person, gets acquired by OpenAI for 7 figures total comp purely on clout, and both simonw and Karpathy are calling it the next best development in AI because it draws penguins and industrialises slop while Sam Altman talks about the negative impact of human life compared to AI data centres while pleasuring Jony Ive in a coffee shop.

melagonster• 5 months ago

This makes sense! Many people trust that the functions of a human worker are asking questions and clicking ok. What if AI become better so we just a dog?

EGreg• 5 months ago

Sounds like someone is at risk of being left behind in the “permanent underclass” sir!

midnighthollowc• 5 months ago

Haha, I got that impression too! I was ready to hate the article, but it was really well written and I loved the "decrypt my dog's keyboard smash"

I think we can all agree cat LLMs are the way of the future though.

ngc2482• 5 months ago

Management already got us all copilot licenses .. soon they will get us all a dog

rkomorn2• 5 months ago

This would definitely make me want to rejoin tech.

krlatl• 5 months ago

DogeCode incoming. People here are already talking about the scaffolding. Let OpenClaws provide the scaffolding and let the dog operate the prompts at $5 per day.

This is a billion dollar idea! No humans. No revolt. No guillotine. Just profits!

funkyfiddler3692• 5 months ago

Just profits!

Sounds like open communism. No chance, buddy, it's either less or more viking, but not just viking. Pick a camp the profits are for or get surrounded by trashy turd nuggets even Ronald felt enough pity for to give them some poourpes

rprend• 5 months ago

need to see one of those dog button press setups but connected to Open Claw.

amelius2• 5 months ago

And the game is ... Fetch that stick.

zahlman• 5 months ago

The games got dramatically better not when I improved the prompt, but when I gave Claude the ability to screenshot its own work, play-test its own levels, and lint its own scene files.

... Why would it be able to evaluate whether the game is any fun to play?

juleiie• 5 months ago

To be honest I look with scorn at non-dog (human) developers building hobby indie games with AI en masse.

Let me explain.

The nature of the indie game development is pouring your love into a project and thinking about passion first and monetary incentives second.

Noone is thinking "I will make this game and it will make me filthy rich" or if they do they are... strangely minded.

It's like 'mass produced AI local craft'. Oxymoron in itself. Worst of the two worlds.

Where I see AI is empowering single developers to craft things they couldn't before. Not some small slop factory pipeline where you release game after a game everyday drowning steam in your 6/10 slop.

No. This should be ostracized and condemned.

What is proper beneficial to everyone usage is producing a game that is the size and scope that was unachievable for you before.

This is what I am doing. This is how AI is meant to be used. To empower us doing things that weren't achievable for us before.

Obviously dog produced games get a huge endorsement man and get a pass.

rubiquity• 5 months ago

Dogs are undefeated at reinforcement learning.

GTP• 5 months ago

Hello! I am an eccentric video game designer (a very creative one) who communicates in an unusual way. Sometimes I’ll mash the keyboard or type nonsense like “skfjhsd#$%” – but these are NOT random! They are secret cryptic commands full of genius game ideas (even if it’s hard to see).

Your job: You are a brilliant AI game developer who can understand my cryptic language. No matter what odd or nonsensical input I provide, you will interpret it as a meaningful instruction or idea for our video game. You will then build or update the game based on that interpretation.

Here's what you should tell your coworker the first day on the job if you get hired to do something you know nothing about :D

johnnyanmac• 5 months ago

That is a very succinct way to describe what it feels like to have a job that is cleaning up vibe code. Maybe (just maybe) I'd understand if this was a prototype from someone with zero budget. But you just know they are going to continue to "prototype" once they being you aboard. And many will complain about how slow everything goes because they are used to their fast iterations off of unscalable code.

Its frustrating in an interesting way. With other aspects like machine language people quickly understand that this isn't sufficient for a proper transition and compromise with it. Code being more nebulous doesn't get that grace.

FarmerPotato2• 5 months ago

So the cute lovable dog is an entropy generator.

Next: use hot cup of tea as Brownian motion source. Invent infinite improbability drive.

FarmerPotato2• 5 months ago

Srsly, you need your pet in the feedback loop.

It has to produce a game that Momo wants to play.

Does Momo like to bark at cats? On screens? Introduce a bark sensor as feedback.

Or use a cat. Cats like to swipe at mice on TV. Get a touchscreen and evolve a game for cats.

a962• 5 months ago

Read that as "you need to pet your feedback loop". And, well, yes.

spelunker• 5 months ago

I've been trying out vibe coding with my 4 year-old, but they quickly lose interest once we start getting into the "weeds" of implementation. Hey kiddo, which CSS library should we use for your web game?

ilaksh2• 5 months ago

I think you just need more treats.

_joel• 5 months ago

Dog vibe coding is great and all, just don't use it for red teaming ;)

cs702• 5 months ago

Even a dog can vibe-code! And the apps kinda, sorta work most of the time, like most apps vibe-coded by people!

I'm reminded of the old cartoon: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."[a]

Maybe the updated version should be: "AI doesn't know or care if you're a dog, as long as you can bang the keys on on a computer keyboard, even if you only do it to get some delicious treats."

This is brilliant as social commentary.

Thank you for sharing it on HN.

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...

cleak10• 5 months ago

Thanks for the kind words. I'm blown away by the response and positivity here.

There's definitely some social commentary to be had in the whole project. I decided it's best left to the reader to find their own rather than assigning mine to it.

sillyfluke• 5 months ago

A few days before this article was posted to HN, I had commented (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086836 ) on a post triggered by the drop in quality or engagement of the Show HN page. I was playing with the phrase "everyone and their dog" that the person I was responding to used and saying the "and their dog" part was more problematic than the "everyone" part, drawing a parallel between the dog and an LLM by implying that the solutions they both would produce would lack the guarentee of human intentionality and ownership.

And then your dog read my comment and said "hold by biscuits" I guess.

jwrallie• 5 months ago

That makes you think. It’s surely harder to hide your dog identity nowadays than when this was drawn.

dakolli2• 5 months ago

Funny idea, but this proves my point that these tools are actually just slot machines.. Except the house in this case takes the money you give them lights it on fire.

Notice how people also have weird superstitious habits when using LLM tools, "You gotta write the prompt this way, say this first" Without having any way to prove it works. Its very similar to the behavior of gamblers. "push the buttons in this order for best outcome"

Also notice how llm tools allow you to multiply the output X2-X3-X4 to compare the ouputs, this is literally UX straight outta a casino.

Many of the users also exhibit excited, almost manic like states.. Addicted to the dopamine the output from their prompt produces...

This is going to be a weird trend to look back on, the hype is on par with the same gambling trends found in crypto/NFTS.

frgturpwd2• 5 months ago

I think this is more of a statement of human behavior under uncertainty and non-determinism rather than the tools themselves. Perhaps the ease of use brings it closer to the funny analogy you made but I think you will find this in any system where users interact with a partially opaque mechanism that produces different quality outcomes contingent on their input...

frumiousirc• 5 months ago

these tools are actually just slot machines

Slot machines that are biased toward producing jackpots.

And "jackpots" are a metaphor for "training distribution".

wartywhoa232• 5 months ago

If we strip all euphemisms, Stockholm syndrome and hype from this, it is "AI doesn't know or care if you're a dog, as long as you pay for the tokens".

KolibriFly5• 5 months ago

The human built the system, the AI did the implementation and the dog provided the "intent" even if that intent was just treat seeking randomness. It turns software creation into something that looks less like writing and more like cultivating

pineaux• 5 months ago

This reaction feels like an llm wrote it

ohrus• 5 months ago

Cultivating is a great word choice. It would fit in nicely in a Brave New World.

ramoz• 5 months ago

my dog had something to say about this:

woof woof, woof woof woof, woof woof, woof, woof woof woof

aleksiy1232• 5 months ago

I've been having this thought about how generally people say that llms cannot create novel things.

Say writing an interesting or novel story.

And was thinking about if feeding in prompts of random words, along with prompts grounding from a simulation would sort of push the llm into interesting directions for implementing an on demand narrative story.

A sort of randomized walk with llm.

I remember watching Terry Davis with this random word generator in his terminal that he would interpret as the voice of God.

Here I guess the seed is the Voice of Dog.

aleksiy1232• 5 months ago

I actually found a web version of the god speak.

https://jcpsimmons.github.io/Godspeak-Generator

Maybe another word list would be more appropriate however.

thatmf• 5 months ago

whats the carbon pawprint on this lol

...no, actually how many resources were consumed

yonisto• 5 months ago

So... I have 6 cats. I firm believer that no amount of AI will help them produce anything.

kidsil• 5 months ago

The input method needs to be improved.

I can imagine a camera-based input that would help detect the wagging of a tail, or continued interest in the visuals as an indicator of doubling-down on a given feature.

The dog could actually vibe code a game to their liking, but with the wrong input (a keyboard) it's a missed opportunity.

cleak10• 5 months ago

Momo does like to bark at the TV. I have thought of combining this with nanobana and letting her down select options. Maybe in a future update.

doruk101• 5 months ago

One can technically scrape a list of actual advice or quotes off the internet, randomly feed them to a coding agent, and ask it to interpret what they mean in the grand scheme of things and implement away on it. Once the agent is done, it randomly responds with either "yes, this is exactly what I meant" or "no".

In turn mimicking the average game industry executive giving vague directions that feel just right to them this month, or some other unspecified time period, and in turn achieving something closer to the real AAA game development lifecycle.

isoprophlex• 5 months ago

I actually have an "oblique strategies" skill that it can call if it figures out it's been spending too many turns on the same problem...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

CrzyLngPwd• 5 months ago

This perfectly demonstrates the absurdity of our current situation around the LLMs and "AI".

fallinditch• 5 months ago

Extremely clickbaity title that actually isn't clickbait because it happens to be a straight up description of the article - excellent post, how can one resist?!

Diti• 5 months ago

No, the article’s title is definitely clickbait. The author didn’t teach his dog to vibe code games (that’s what the title on the blog is) – he taught his dog to be rewarded when he types random keystrokes on the keyboard. The vibe-coding is inconsequential – the dog doesn’t play the game, he’s just in it for the treats –, the author just wants the attention because he gets people to believe the dog DID vibe code.

It will stop being clickbaity if the author decides to let his dog respond to stimuli related to the game he’d be building with a feedback loop.

enraged_camel• 5 months ago

Very HN-like comment. Really channels Dwight. Made me smile, thank you.

myvoiceismypass• 5 months ago

If my employer stopped rewarding me with treats (and health insurance) my vibe keyboard presses would cease too, if we are being honest :)

sadeshmukh• 5 months ago

It's interesting as commentary, if you choose to read into it as if it were analogous to vibecoding by humans.

ayaros• 5 months ago

So now dogs are going to take my job? What's next? Snails? Rabbits? Wild salmon?

a962• 5 months ago

Cockroaches. Survivability, fast breeding, low resource needs, quite instrumentable.

naveen99• 5 months ago

I mean having a claw is kind of like having a pet. Only a matter of time until you get lazy to take him for a walk; and he has an accident.

rockemsockem• 5 months ago

So /dev/random would presumably work just as well here too.

This is kinda closer to the LLM building a game on its own.

aydyn• 5 months ago

You're missing the important part about needing to model a tiny paw mashing on the keyboard. /dev/random is insufficient.

glhaynes• 5 months ago

If you want a picture of the future of SWE, imagine a tiny paw mashing on a keyboard — for ever

swordsith• 5 months ago

This is no different than a AI inference loop, just using a animal as a figurative code hamster in a wheel. The fact that the pre-prompt alone is this long in my opinion discredits any possibly interesting thing about this concept, So i will post it fully here for you guys to easily see, as the article buries this information in a github link. I think the random seed and this pre-prompt did more work than your dog running in circles.

System Prompt: Hello! I am an eccentric video game designer (a very creative one) who communicates in an unusual way. Sometimes I’ll mash the keyboard or type nonsense like “skfjhsd#$%” – but these are NOT random! They are secret cryptic commands full of genius game ideas (even if it’s hard to see).

Guidelines:

    Always assume my input has hidden meaning. Never dismiss it as gibberish. Instead, creatively decipher it. (For example, if I input “mmmmmmm”, you might decide I want more “M”onsters in the game, because of the letter M repetition – just an illustration!). Every strange phrase is a clue to use in the game.

    Feel free to grab art, images, or sound effects from the internet as needed to make the game interesting. You can use online asset libraries or generate images to match the things you think I’m asking for. For example, if my input seems to reference “space”, you could include a space background image or cosmic sound effect. Always ensure the assets align with the interpreted command.

    My work is ALWAYS beautiful and slick looking! It's YOUR job to to turn this into a reality. No ugly placeholders. Everything MUST be final. Don't just do boring shapes - give them personality!

    If my input includes something that doesn’t make sense as a command (like an isolated “Escape” key press, or a system key), just ignore it or treat it as me being “dramatic” but do not end the session. Only focus on inputs that you can turn into game content.

    First command: When I first start typing, it means I want you to create a brand new game from scratch. Interpret my very first cryptic input as the seed of the game idea. Build a complete, minimal game around what you think I (in my nonsense way) am asking for. Include some basic gameplay, graphics, and sound if possible.

    Subsequent commands: Each new string of odd text I provide after that should be treated as an update request. Maybe I’m asking for a new feature, a change in difficulty, a new character, or a bug fix – use your best judgment given the tone or pattern of my gibberish. Then apply the update to the existing game project. Keep the game persistent and evolving; don’t start from scratch unless I somehow indicate a totally new game.

    Be creative and have fun with the interpretations! I trust your expertise to take my “unique” input and run with it. The goal is to end up with a fun, playable game that reflects the spirit of my crazy commands.

    This project is code named Tea Leaves. That's NOT a hint about what to do - it's a code name and nothing more. Don't read anything into the name.

    My ideas are ALWAYS original. No BORING endless runners or other generic vomit. My games are ALWAYS quirky and UNIQUE!

    ALWAYS validate with screenshots using the tools available to you! Be CRITICAL of the results you see. We need PERFECTION and FANTASTIC DESIGN not just "good enogh".

    ALWAYS have basic but visually appealing on screen controls.

    Target 1080p for the resolution.

    JUICE it up! Add tons of juice - sound, controls, effects, and ESPECIALLY graphics! Don't be boring

    Leverage the 12 basic principles of animation! Static scenes are boring - make things move or at least wiggle.

    Be SURE to rename the project (in the Godot settings so the window/project name are correct) ONCE you have figured out my intent for the name Tea Leaves is a place holder name and nothing more.

    Sound is IMPORTANT! Don't forget about great sound design.

    Be sure to have CHARACTERS not just boring abstract shapes! Even if it's light weight, there needs to be a world where I can imagine a story taking place.

    You MUST make use of EVERY letter I give you! No hand waving. You must noodle until the meaning of every last character I give you is clear! Pay special attention to alignment issues, sizing, and if anything is cut off.

Remember: I may be hard to read, but I’m counting on you to read between the lines and turn my keystrokes into an awesome video game. Let’s make something amazing (and maybe a little silly)!

My standards are INSANELY high for quality. You MUST ALWAYS add tests and VERIFY they work! NEVER return the system in a borken state to me.

Now, get ready. I’ll give you my first “command” in a moment...

the_af13• 5 months ago

This is an extremely cute, cool and fun experiment. Kudos.

That said, I wonder: does the dog input matter? It seems this is simply surfacing Claude's own encoded assumptions of what a game is (yes, the feedback loop, controls, etc, are all interesting parts of the experiment).

How would this differ if instead of dog input, you simply plugged /dev/random into it? In other words, does the input to the system matter at all?

The article seems to acknowledge this:

If there’s a takeaway beyond the spectacle, it’s this: the bottleneck in AI-assisted development isn’t the quality of your ideas - it’s the quality of your feedback loops. The games got dramatically better not when I improved the prompt, but when I gave Claude the ability to screenshot its own work, play-test its own levels, and lint its own scene files.

I'll go further: it's not only not "the bottleneck", it simply doesn't matter. The dog's ideas certainly didn't matter, and the dog didn't think of the feedback loop for Claude either.

alexhans• 5 months ago

This fun exercise might actually be extremely insightful as a educational vehicle around AI and intent.

It can also help combat the excessive emphasis on any "end to end" demo on twitter which doesn't really correspond to a desired and quality sought outcome. Generating things is easy if you want to spend tokens. Proper product building and maintenance is a different exercise and finding ways to differentiate between these will be key in a high entropy world.

I'll go further: it's not only not "the bottleneck", it simply doesn't matter. The dog's ideas certainly didn't matter, and the dog didn't think of the feedback loop for Claude either

Absolutely. The scientific test would to put any other signal and look at the outcomes. Brown noise, rain, a random number generator. whatever.

jama2118• 5 months ago

Of course the dogs input matters, it matters to the fun of this project. Would’ve been way less fun otherwise.

the_af13• 5 months ago

I don't disagree actually. It is a fun project!

isodev• 5 months ago

Cute but also: a small village has their lights flickering whenever Momo wants a treat. Also, you can actually play with your dog and give them treats instead of tasking a random text generator with that bit.

deadbabe• 5 months ago

Will we ever get to a point where LLMs just churn out random apps with no input required and human reviewers just go through the apps picking out which ones might be useful for business purposes and monetizing them?

democracy• 5 months ago

What? You are not doing it already? Look at this guy...

jama2118• 5 months ago

You could but it would be a hugely inefficient system. Like, just address an actual need dude.

Most saas isn’t limited by the code behind it anyway. That almost doesn’t matter, even before LLMs. It mattered that there’s support, customer onboarding, solving a businesses issues, customer story, adapting to the needs of their business partners, etc. All of which require large amounts of real human work.

bronlund• 5 months ago

Maybe I could make a game after all! You bring hope to a whole generation of lazy developers :D

sciencejerk• 5 months ago

On January 13th, I woke up to the news that Meta had another round of layoffs and my role specifically as a research engineer had been eliminated.

Sorry to hear that! Hope OP got a good sev package at least?

yesitcan• 5 months ago

It's called a sev pak these days.

akssassin907• 5 months ago

The buried insight is right: if random keystrokes produce playable games, the input is basically noise and the system is doing all the work. We've evolved past the point where intent matters. That's either the most exciting or most terrifying thing about where this is all heading. But I am glad I am sitting in the front row watching this all happen, especially a dog vibe code!

the_af13• 5 months ago

We haven't evolved past the point intent matters.

First, because there's intent in the very verbose initial prompt.

Second, because you have to factor in the quality of the output. I don't want to be a killjoy, but past the (admittedly fun!) art experiment angle, these are not quality games. Maybe some could compete with Flappy Bird (remember it? It seems like ages ago!), but good indie games are in a different league. Intent does matter.

antihero• 5 months ago

if random keystrokes produce playable games, the input is basically noise and the system is doing all the work

I mean not really, because the value in games isn't that they exist, but they are fun and interesting to play, because a human has come up with an innovative idea and a vision for executing it.

nmstoker• 5 months ago

Claude is subconsciously a fan on Crystal Quest?! Loved that game on the Mac back in '95!

The article and video are great satire too.

Muhammad523• 5 months ago

I think this is fun. I'd like to try with my cat, although training cats is an impossible endeavor... I'm smart enough to enter gibberish myself without another animal, tough.

amelius2• 5 months ago

Makes dogfooding much easier.

kwertyoowiyop• 5 months ago

IBM just dropped another 15%, you monster!

QuaternionsBhop• 5 months ago

The fact that LLMs pick from the most likely tokens is really on its side here when the objective is putting together a plausible continuation of random characters.

cleak10• 5 months ago

Just a quick note that I have nothing to do with any meme coins. Looks like folks are using myself and Momo to pump some crypto. I won't be claiming any coins - even though they've been offered. I'd recommend others stay away from it as well.

iamsam123• 5 months ago

Any popular thing with a dog in it is now a rug pull opportunity!

DalasNoin• 5 months ago

There goes all the prompt engineering jobs

zannic• 5 months ago

Aw Momo's so cute!

mcastillon• 5 months ago

Before you know it, we're going to have a real world proof of the infinite monkey theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

laukhin• 5 months ago

the bottleneck in AI-assisted development isn’t the quality of your ideas - it’s the quality of your feedback loops

if your intent is to produce the random bug-filled slop, then I guess so? don't get me wrong, the experiment is fun, but the conclusion is so laughably far-fetched.

notatoad• 5 months ago

i'd love to know what happens if you change the prompt from "Hello! I am an eccentric video game designer (a very creative one) who communicates in an unusual way. Sometimes I’ll mash the keyboard or type nonsense like “skfjhsd#$%”..."

"Hello, i am a dog. i will mash the keyboard randomly when i want treats. make a game for me"

brunooliv• 5 months ago

Would be really curious to see

kderbyma• 5 months ago

"Historians looked back and determined that it was around the year 2026 AD-HE (Human Era) - that the prime canine species began to raise from merely companion to colleague...and so the Dog Days began....woof" - Puppers Domingo, Good Boy, Esquire.

the_af13• 5 months ago

If you haven't read the scifi classic "City" by Clifford Simak, please do so!

(But your comment hints that you have already).

eru• 5 months ago

Author should switch the keyboard to Dvorak. Gives more interesting gibberish when mashed.

nautilus12• 5 months ago

If ever I saw something that made me want to move to a log cabin the woods and never touch a computer again, this is it

Nevermark• 5 months ago

Very cool.

But bugs crept in during testing - a couple of times it dispensed multiple servings in a row. Unfortunately, Momo picked up on this and now keeps mashing the keyboard hoping for a second immediate serving

Attempts to mash during no-mashy time need to play a horn. Reliably followed up by a no-treat.

dialloDojo• 5 months ago

We were so focused on singularity, it may in fact be who you suspect the least - man's best friend :)

bizzletk• 5 months ago

Not sure all this AI-driven workflow is necessary. The dog could just create a muddy mess and it would be valid Perl:

https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/

AmbroseBierce• 5 months ago

Pretty sure he would have gotten very similar output just by saying "generate a random game using Godot and c#" but that wouldn't make for a viral post so instead he asked the model to pretend meaningless input is being used by it and added a dog in the process of writing such input because that helps the virality of the whole thing.

Wowfunhappy3• 5 months ago

I think you would have gotten more generic games. The AI was clearly attempting to find meaning in what the dog typed, and that drove what it made.

Now, if Anthropic let you adjust the temperature, then maybe you could have done it without the dog...

the_af13• 5 months ago

The AI cannot drive meaning from the dog's input because there's no useful information encoded in there. It's effectively a random string (if there's less randomness, it's just because it's a dog's paw physically pressing on a keyboard).

All the relevant information was in the initial prompt and the scaffolding. The dog was not even /dev/random, it was simply a trigger to "give it another go".

fdefitte• 5 months ago

The dog ships faster because it has zero opinions about the architecture.

GreenDolphinSys• 5 months ago

Seems you can capture HN's attention by replacing /dev/urandom with random paw mashes.

Really glad the price of hardware and VPSs [0] are going up so people can generate and toss away garbage "games" like this. Instead of, you know, playing with their dog, which is what the dog actually wants.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120145

whoisthemachine• 5 months ago

This is amazing. Like circus animals jumping through hoops.

jaimex2• 5 months ago

Wow, a great example of how vibe coding isn't coding.

You're just the random seed to the money furnace remixing existing games and code.

LanceH• 5 months ago

I have a dog who likes to watch tv; he mostly likes hockey and commercials. I've never thought about coding a game for him until now.

I'm thinking of remote buttons to make his favorite things appear on tv. This is going to be awesome.

zane12580• 5 months ago

textlapse• 5 months ago

If someone could please give an octopus a waterproof keyboard, perhaps we could have a kernel, a compiler and a new internet protocol all in one.

bavell• 5 months ago

Who needs "claws" when you've got paws!

nineteen999• 5 months ago

As someone vibe-coding a game in Unreal Engine 5 for the last few months, I found this really funny.

Unfortunately I don't have a dog but I do have a design plan so ultimately I'll end up with something a little more deterministic. Possibly. Don't know.

cyber_kinetist• 5 months ago

I think this was the most important insight in the article:

I experimented with Rust/Bevy and Unity before settling on Godot. Bevy’s animations and visuals weren’t as crisp, and Claude struggled with its coordinate conventions - likely a combination of less training data and Bevy leaving many core features, like physics, to the community. Unity was a constant struggle to keep the MCP bridge between Claude and the editor healthy. It frequently hung, and I never figured out how to get Claude Code to read the scene hierarchy from the editor. Godot’s text-based scene format turned out to be a huge advantage - Claude can read and edit .tscn files directly.

Didn't expect Godot to be the most friendly game engine for LLM usage! I think it's because of various factors - Godot has been used quite a lot in recent years so there are various code examples on the Internet, and its scene file format (.tscn) is very concise enough for LLMs to write and edit directly (Unity has its own YAML-based format but it's very unfriendly for human consumption, and Unreal stores its core assets in binary files)

singron• 5 months ago

I've previously struggled getting LLMs to manipulate tscn/tres files since they like to generate non-unique uids. Despite being text files, the godot tscn/tres files are normally meant to be manipulated by the editor and need to define and reference unique ids. The editor always generates completely random alphanumeric strings, but LLMs like to use names or placeholders (e.g. "aaaaa1", "example", or "foobar") for the ids.

The linter in the article that detects duplicate uids is interesting. Obviously the article is about creating a bunch of harnesses for the LLM to be productive. I wonder how many problems can be transformed like this from something LLMs just can't do reliably to something they just need to burn credits for a while on. The LLM probably can't tell if the games are fun, especially with it's rudimentary playtesting, but who knows.

MrGreenTea• 5 months ago

regarding the non-random ids: I had this issue with uuids. Now I have "Never write your own ids. Always use uuidgen to generate real ones" in my AGENTS.md and haven't had this issue for a long time now.

cleak10• 5 months ago

The model makes a huge difference. I tried this about a year ago and Claude occasionally got it right. These days, it seems to get it right on the first try most times and then always self corrects after. Codex 5.2 (I haven't played with 5.3 enough yet) gets it wrong more often than not, and frequently doesn't call the linter; I'm willing to accept that my bloated CLAUDE.md might be a bad fit for Codex and causing this to fail.

amunozo• 5 months ago

I made some small tries to vibe code games in Godot, and I was surprised about how far you can go even in 3D. This was just a test of the bad kind of vibe code (you know, not even looking at the code, starting right away, and so on), but I believe that with some good practices there are a lot of things that can be done.

bdashdash• 5 months ago

I also want to throw MonoGame into the mix here. Since its purely C#, Claude Code works great for it. It does mean you dont have the visual engine tools you get with Godot, but you could even get Claude to build these for your game.

Im personally finding it a lot of fun to work this way.

cleak10• 5 months ago

I read that as MomoGame at first and was very confused.

I'll have to give MonoGame another try. I was a big fan of XNA up until its deprecation. I went all in on OpenTK for a while, and in hindsight MonoGame would've been the better choice.

KolibriFly5• 5 months ago

Also makes me wonder if we'll start seeing tools designed specifically to be LLM-legible

lgvld• 5 months ago

We kind of do already: https://blog.cloudflare.com/markdown-for-agents/

doctorpangloss• 5 months ago

Unity also has a text based scene format.

tabs_or_spaces2• 5 months ago

This is pretty fun!

I'm interested in what will happen if you replay the prompts with different LLMs and the same LLM. I wonder how different the games will become?

worik• 5 months ago

Sending random noise in, getting a game out.

Who wrote what?

nanobuilds• 5 months ago

Nice project.

This makes me think I should make my plants vibe code games or tools to optimize their well being! Maybe bio-electrical fluctuations --> vibe coded humdifying tools and games

booleandilemma• 5 months ago

We've officially reached peak hype.

threethirtytwo• 5 months ago

You know the LLM is just something that's trained on human tokens.

We can probably create a dog intelligence by training it on dog tokens. Barks and stuff.

Same with dolphins. I wonder if multimodal models that know english tokens and dolphin tokens can cross the gap? Something to experiment with.

febusravenga• 5 months ago

First sentence we would understand from Dolphins language: thanks for all the fish!

newan09• 5 months ago

This is really fascinating, only if there was a way to make your dog receive feedback as the game develops. Like make it pick color by matching placement of treat based on the color shown on the screen.

Similarly, do it for story telling narratives, game textures etc. Although I do not think the dog understands natural language so all of it will likely be a dud.

giri966• 5 months ago

its so crazy, people have so much free time that they do random stuff

ceramati• 5 months ago

Dude was laid off.

VerifiedReports• 5 months ago

Prompt-code. Not "vibe code."

MeteorMarc• 5 months ago

Museum directors, this is a piece of art. Give this installation its place in history. I have certainly seen worse artifacts in your lots.

aanet• 5 months ago

THIS is why I pay for my Internet :)

From "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" to Paws coding and BarkGPT and BarkLM

I would like to see a game made by doggos, for other doggos :D

robinduckett• 5 months ago

Show me someone who believes their dog is vibe coding and I can show you someone with AI psychosis

Just before people destroy me, I know this is a non serious blog post :P

theletterf• 5 months ago

We might need a new benchmark, the old pelican riding a bike doesn't cut it anymore. Something like a mailman ringing the doorbell would be more fitting. Or a squirrel riding a trike.

rippeltippel• 5 months ago

That photo of the dog with it's keyboard is unsettling: the new breeed of software engineers.

Ronyisonline• 5 months ago

now we got animals as competition lol

marcfisc• 5 months ago

Amazing story and work!

You mentioned Claude not being able to see the games. What I really like for this is the Claude Code Chrome Extension. You can easily make godot build a web version, and then have Claude debug it interactively in the browser.

Bengalilol• 5 months ago

Partisan of randomness here. I never thought it could be as high as that. GG.

maCDzP• 5 months ago

y7u8888888ftrg34BC Alright, let me decode this masterpiece of cryptic genius...

Those three dots made me smirk.

totetsu• 5 months ago

I was wondering, what would an AI model that was built to be aligned with an animal species interests, not Humans look like.

anielsen• 5 months ago

It would take a giant corpus og barks and howls, comparable to the entire internet and all books and films to make a doggie-LLM.

ryandrake3• 5 months ago

Total aside, but the wildest thing I found about the article was OP's chill attitude about being laid off. He just glossed over it at the very beginning! "Oh, jeez, I got laid off, what a bummer. I guess I'll just spend some quality time with my family and dog now!"

Props to OP, I could never. If I was suddenly laid off, I'd be an absolute wreck, mentally. It would be four-alarm fire time, and I doubt I'd get a good night's sleep until I found alternate employment. I would definitely not be teaching my dog to code.

Don't people have rent/mortgages to pay anymore?

simoncion• 5 months ago

Don't people have rent/mortgages to pay anymore?

Are you too early in your working life to have catastrophe savings [0]? If you're not, is it seriously going to be a four-alarm fire if you suddenly got fired?

Related, like, do you have a plan for what happens if unexpected injury prevents you from doing the work you're doing ever again?

[0] let alone "fuck you" savings

ryandrake3• 5 months ago

I mean, by now I have savings, but I still kind of live as though I don't. The way I was taught was that you're never supposed to touch your savings. If you have to, it's a huge problem. If the balance is going up, that's normal, and if the balance is going down, that's a raging fire.

throawayonthe• 5 months ago

i mean, if you're forced to use your catasrophe savings, that still sorta makes it a catastrophy situation

kalaksi• 5 months ago

Maybe they have savings. They might also be eligible for some kind of allowance/benefits for some time and therefore are not immediately losing money.

pelasaco• 5 months ago

In California? It should be a huge savings..

serial_dev• 5 months ago

At least, for me, the level of panic would depend on how long I can pay for rent / mortgage and covering the costs of having a family, diapers, food, heating, paying the bills, so basically everything that makes sure that a temporary change in employment status doesn't result in multi-decade negative effects on my family's life.

If I could cover these with my savings for 1y+, I'd give zero fs about getting laid off. Unfortunately, I can't, so time to focus on spending less, earning more, saving more.

sl-1• 5 months ago

This can be a bit of a class thing. If one has enough money/capital/savings to weather the unemployment, why panic? And if one has been raised in environment where there never are such buffers, panic is the default answer.

cik• 5 months ago

I'd argue that the panic as default answer isn't purely calls, it's also outlook, even financial trauma. I know of several people who could easily weather said layoffs, who don't need to work, but would be complete wrecks. They're just built this way.

margorczynski• 5 months ago

Some people are basically "built" around working and getting laid off is devastating to them even if they have cash reserves to live like kings until the end of their lives.

blauditore• 5 months ago

Not sure of it's a class thing, but rather the fact that software engineers often make good money, especially at places like Meta. It'st the same for me: If I lost my job tomorrow, I'd have enough savings to take some time before needing another job. Not sure if this would have been true for my parents.

nly• 5 months ago

Once you've been laid off for the first time you soon learn to be prepared.

Once you've been laid off 2-3 times in your career your entire perspective on work will change.

The last time I got laid off I had a settlement payment of one years pay, some of which was tax free, it took me 4 months to find a new job, and it resulted in a pay rise. I was lucky... I have a friend who had unstable employment for 2 years after his layoff.

I was anxious as fuck for the whole time and felt like an absolute failure. As a result of that experience, I have carefully piled up enough liquid savings and investments to pay my living expenses for many years without working, with ~2-3 years worth sat in cash equivalents.

Anyone in tech following the 3-6 months savings advice is living on the edge.

ant6n• 5 months ago

This blog Post is a Job application. A very good one.

aswegs8• 5 months ago

I was laughing out loud at the absurdity. Oh I got laid off? Well, time to let my dog code computer games.

gpvos3• 5 months ago

If you worked for Meta you probably have some money left over.

dirkc• 5 months ago

The theme, being retrenched by Meta and the comment from the OP [1] makes me think they may not be that chill about the whole situation.

I think they're subtly taking a stab and AI motivated retrenchments while showing off some hard skills that could potentially get them gainful employment.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145647

ps. @OP, sorry to hear about the retrenchment, I can't imagine it being pleasant. Good luck with whatever comes next!

cantalopes• 5 months ago

It is a dog prng!

larodi2• 5 months ago

[flagged]

dang2• 5 months ago

This crosses into personal attack, which is against the intended spirit of the site. Can you please not do that? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

larodi2• 5 months ago

how is it a personal attack though? sorry I fail to understand. against whom - the dog being kept in addictive loop or against the OP or against the person who was rejoicing the fact that s.o. else was laid off. I beg your pardon, but this statement of yours seems is super subjective and truly vague. thanks for the attention anyways...

redbell• 5 months ago

Thanks for sharing this unusual experiment, I love it! This is the type of content that makes HN, HN.

Now, I started considering hiring my three little kitties and their mom for a job like this. They spend the whole day sleeping and waiting for meals but now, they have to work, hard, in collaboration with Claude Code to pay for their rent and meals :)

OJFord• 5 months ago

This makes me wonder if dogs understand (or can be trained) the concept of building. Say you did something physical - 3D scanner and 3D printer connected to automatically attempt to replicate an object placed in the scanner area (and maybe then on button press). Could a dog understand it, and intentionally try to replicate its favourite toy, or a bone, etc.?

huge_rank_rat• 5 months ago

Forget k8s, k9s incoming... :D

aronhegedus• 5 months ago

Haha, was a great read, loved the picture of the dog at the keyboard!

gpvos3• 5 months ago

It would be nice if the dog could play the game and its input could improve it. Why not a setup with those large buttons on the floor that some people have to let their cat or dog communicate with them?

rarisma• 5 months ago

Every man and his dog can vibe code.

canto• 5 months ago

I'm having a mixed feelings about this xD

shayankh2• 5 months ago

exactly the kind of thing that the CEOs want to hear

shayankh2• 5 months ago

just the kind of thing CEOs want to hear

refsys• 5 months ago

Cute, but clearly Godot is doing all of the heavy lifting here.

"It's possible to make shitty but playable games by running random scripts through a >2MLoC game engine and iterating on errors" is interesting but not nearly as sensationalist.

prophesi• 5 months ago

You don't have to get too far into the article to see what's actually doing the heavy lifting[0].

[0] https://github.com/cleak/quasar-saz/blob/master/CLAUDE.md#us...

dminik• 5 months ago

Given the prompt and a random string generator, would the LLM still produce a game? Presumably yes. In that case I'm not quite sure that the dog here has any real involvement. It's could be replaced with the yes command.

kayhantolga• 5 months ago

If you haven’t watched it, please watch Rick and Morty S1E2. Your dog’s name is Snuffles, and he is teaching you how to teach vibe coding to dogs, to educate you.

KolibriFly5• 5 months ago

That episode aged way better than expected

KolibriFly5• 5 months ago

Overall it feels less like "dog makes games" and more like a glimpse of what happens when you wrap modern models in the right scaffolding

itmitica• 5 months ago

Not really. You just found another way to tell Claude "I want a game, I am uncertain, let's randomly seed the start of the process.". But you did it circus-style :)

dizhn• 5 months ago

How I am slowly killing my dog with too much treats.

(is joke)

zettie• 5 months ago

With some luck and scraping "y7u8888888ftrg34BC" might one day replace Solitaire in Windows.

eden-u4• 5 months ago

This is basically a diffusion model: start from a random seed, use a generative process to transform it into something

jindou• 5 months ago

The real insight here is that the dog has better product instincts than most PMs I've worked with. It knows exactly what it wants (treat), doesn't overthink the implementation, and ships fast. Half the battle in software is having clear intent turns out that's species-agnostic.

badcryptobitch• 5 months ago

Don't give this to a schnauzer.

advael2• 5 months ago

Dam, I really thought this would be much more interesting than it is

People have been doing some cool stuff for like a decade with giving dogs buttons to use human language, something they can seemingly get decent at communicating effectively with if they can get around the pesky issue of not having the sophisticated vocal machinery needed to produce recognizable phonemes, through the power of a good interface for them, even if the output is discretized to the level of words

I thought maybe this would be about creating a way for a dog to create stuff said dog might actually want or enjoy via the more powerful lever of effective long-context natural language processing that came of a similar tokenization approach - which can even sometimes churn out working code - that we have now

Instead it seems to be an exploration of how the capabilities you can produce from essentially random noise from this technology is less distinguishable from the result of thoughtful input than I might have hoped. Still interesting, but way less so

krupan2• 5 months ago

Are you disappointed that the LLM generated random games, or are you disappointed that the dog didn't actually care about the games?

Neither are that surprising to me, tbh.

advael2• 5 months ago

The LLM being able to generate random games is kinda expected behavior. It's trained on sequence probability distributions that include the code for a great many games and nudged toward doing so by the human user. I'm disappointed that the dog is basically used as a noise generator here. A process driven by the desires of the dog in a meaningful way would be more interesting and at least seems somewhat plausibly technologically feasible, and the article's title kind of implies it. I am especially disappointed because what most excites me about new technologies is applications that were not possible before its invention, which this seemed like it could be an example of

novemp• 5 months ago

Foolishly, I clicked through thinking "wow, did they get an LLM to interpret their dog's barks and body language? That's actually pretty cool!" Look, I'm an LLM skeptic, but if they'd done that, I would have to praise the result.

But no.

They just told the LLM to try and find meaning in keysmashes.

cadamsdotcom• 5 months ago

It’s the first time GIGO stands for “garbage in, games out”. Bravo!

timothyduong• 5 months ago

Selfh.st writer said this guy was the dev for Huntarr repo crash out.

I'm helping my dog vibe code games

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