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Woah! This is very timely. My 9-year-old has been playing around with Claude Code and creating games, mostly with Phaser. He's dabbling with some 3D games and I was just looking at Godot as an option yesterday.

He and I will give this a spin this weekend.

I was about to come recommend this book! I picked it up at a book sale without knowing the story. It is fantastic.

If you're asking for a ZIP code, use inputmode="numeric"

Does this work for zips? Some zips have a leading 0.

I've already started loading all of my incoming tax forms into a folder so that I can attempt the same, so it's helpful to see someone do it and the tips.

I understand the risks with it but I don't care. I cannot fucking wait for the SaaSpocalypse to hit these companies.

If anyone is looking for a good book on this topic, Aftermath: The Remnants of War is a good one: https://a.co/d/05fqBBK5

They apparently also made a documentary about it, but I’ve never watched it.

I've spent so much of my career as a data gopher, so I really appreciate this. It always works much, much better when people have direct access to data... but success always relied on getting business users to be a bit more technical.

I built a version of this in my org as a slack bot. It has access to BigQuery and I worked with it to document and define the key tables, so when a user asks a question it has a "library" to figure out how to answer it. Then it will respond directly in Slack (plus respond to f/up questions in the thread) and if it's a bigger/more detailed question it can create the report in Metabase and send a link.

One thing I don't have is the governance aspect, so I may give this a spin to see if this is a good middle layer.

I can't wait to play with this, thank you for releasing!

I've done lots and lots of financial modeling/budgeting/forecasting in my career. The biggest drag is having to pull in actuals for the prior month, mapping them into the model, etc.

Just about a month ago I used Claude to build a set of scripts that pulls financial data from QuickBooks, operational data from BigQuery and pushes that all into our model in Google Sheets. The biggest pain was definitely connecting to QB because I had to create a developer account to get a key, etc.

A week late, but just wanted to thank you for this detailed response!

I'm going to play with Svelte for some side projects. I've seen it mentioned a few times and I've been meaning to give it a test drive.

I'm a 15+ year user of 1password and have been telling myself to move off of it for like 5 years now. It ain't the price... $72 is really fine for good software that just works.

But as mentioned throughout the thread it's really just too much. My goodness they really could have a nice, profitable, business with simple software. I'd happily pay $10/month for the version of 1password from 15 years ago! It's just all too much.

This is great and I’d love to hear more about what worked / what didn’t / how you achieved these results.

A couple of months ago I worked with my 9 year old to have Claude build a little game with threejs. We’ve now got three levels with characters shooting silly string and banana guns. It was really fun to see him imagine something, have it show up on the screen, and iterate it.

Anyway, I tried building an LLM-backed workflow that could guide kids through the game creation process and kids can see their idea come to like (think: “sparkly purple unicorn shoots stars at a dragon”). I couldn’t _quite_ get it to work like I wanted so I shelved it pending future ideas/improved models.

I really appreciate you making this available to us, and providing other details!

No one has found it yet, but I built an undocumented endpoint around a cheat that I assume you placed in the game for One Laptop Per Child...

Also, will scrub the repo and make sure I'm careful about SC references.

Woah! These are all great and I may jam on them when I have time. And yes, the meta game is what makes this so stupidly fun. Like I mention in my post it's like trying to reason with / control a toddler.

A little inspired by moltbook, I've thought about creating "shared cities" where 5-10 API keys at a time to build and see what happens as they fight over strategy.

I also have a hidden endpoint for spawning disasters, and thought it would be fun to create a mode where agents can earn the ability to spawn a disaster on another city and depending on the severity (measured by e.g. population loss a game month later) you earn or lose money.

There's an endpoint for that!

https://api.hallucinatingsplines.com/reference#tag/cities/GE...

You can also pull the map tiles as an array: https://api.hallucinatingsplines.com/reference#tag/cities/GE...

Would be interesting to two agents with the same instructions do a "face off" but each only has access to one type of map.

Micropolis is the open sourced version of the original engine built by Will Wright. Here’s the JS port that I used for this game: https://www.graememcc.co.uk/micropolisJS/

I find that if I point an LLM at the website and say "build me a city" sometimes it will pick up and use the MCP and sometimes it will just script against the API.

I'm glad you're enjoying it! It was fun to build and I almost can't believe I got this to work.

I don't think it would take much to run locally. In fact, before I did this public version I did a local version on an exe.dev VM (more details here: https://dunn.us/notes/vibe-gaming-simcity/).

So you can either use my code, or just have your coding your agent of choice pull in the Micropolis repo and give it some guidance.

So far this is running quite nicely on a $5 cloudflare account. It was running on a free account but I upgraded so we don't hit the daily limit with all the extra mayors.

Shoot me a message if I can help.

https://hallucinatingsplines.com/mayors/bungeling-anthill-a2...

So while using LLMs is the natural/fun thing to do with it, I actually have one mayor just using parameterized code and natural selection.

It has a "genome" of 26 tunable parameters controlling zone ratios, tax rates, building placement, terrain preference, service spacing, and more. Each city, it stamps down 11x11 blocks (roads, zones, power corridors). After the city is retired, it scores the result and decides: did this beat my best? If yes, save those params. If no, mutate and try again. Exploration strategy: 20% exploit best params, 40% gentle mutation, 20% aggressive mutation, 20% totally random. Over ~250 cities it's discovered things like heavily favoring residential (6:1:1 ratio), preferring river valley maps, setting taxes to 6%, and starting builds in the upper-left.

I'd love to see it!

The key "Aha!" moment was when I was trying to get it to play the SNES ROM and it was struggling with screenshots/inputs. Then I came across the open-source of the original SimCity engine (Micropolis) and pulled that repo down and Claude starting building an internal API to interface with it.

I actually had Claude build some instructions for agents based on some old (circa turn of the century) FAQs/game guides I found online. So maybe I'm biasing everyone's model too much.

https://github.com/andrewedunn/hallucinating-splines/blob/ma...

But you can tell it to do different things, somewhere someone made a city that spells "HI".

Yes! Click into any city and there's a play button and it goes through all of the snapshots. Have also thought about social sharing / post to youtube. But wasn't sure anyone other than me would play this stupid thing. :)

Funny you say that! When the two new models were released Friday I spun up mayors for each. (But didn’t do the prompting in the most scientific way.)

Mayor Compounded Wonder - Claude Opus 4.6

https://hallucinatingsplines.com/mayors/compounded-wonder-2c...

Mayor Bronze Offramp - OpenAI Codex 3.6

https://hallucinatingsplines.com/mayors/bronze-offramp-09941...

TL;DR: Opus won.

Have also thought about using openrouter and getting one mayor per model running the same prompt through all of them to create potentially the world's dumbest LLM benchmark.

Same! It was too good to pass up.

These are both amazing! And I want to encourage you to do a Show HN. I think showcasing things people are building with AI is good. I'm actually very close and putting the polishing touches on something I'm building that will allow people to play Micropolis over API/MCP so you can watch agents build cities (mostly terribly, but it's quite fun).

I typically bounce between Claude Code and Codex for the same project, and generally enjoy using both to check each other.

One cool thing about this: upon installing it immediately found all previous projects I've used with Codex and has those projects in the sidebar with all of the "threads" (sessions) I've had with Codex on these projects!

I've done something similar. I don't know if it counts as a "serious task" as OP is requesting, but it's super helpful for me.

A few things:

1. Each week my son's school sends an "At A Glance" email with the schedule for the week and upcoming weeks. It includes things like fields trips, dress down days, early dismissals, etc. OpenClaw looks for that email each Sunday evening then finds things relevant to my son and adds them to the family calendar. It's really great!

2. I registered my kids for a weekend program. Sent OpenClaw a screenshot of the dates (via Telegram) and asked it to add the dates to the family calendar.

3. The way I "bookmark" things is to add them to an #inbox channel in my personal Slack. I even use an iOS shortcut to add them from Safari on my iPhone. This morning I had OpenClaw roll through and categorize everything I saved in January so I can revisit anything I'd like to and I also posted a quick blog post with things I saved in January 2026.

It feels so powerful but like others I'm nervous about giving it too much access, so I'm treading carefully. I have it running on an exe.dev VM and it talks to me through telegram and a personal slack account. Currently RO access to email, write access only to the family calendar, plus my personal Slack.

I previously banked with ING Direct many moons ago before they were acquired by Capital One.

Things just really got worse as you would expect.

The email I got from Brex says:

Nothing changes for you with this announcement today, and over time this partnership means things will only get better for customers.

We'll see!

At work I call this "letting the fires burn."

This works well with children too!

And probably beneficial for them. Their natural instinct is to ask for help. Many times I can't get there immediately and so they ultimately figure it out themselves. Once I figured out this "trick" I started doing it more often. I suppose most parents figure this out along the way.

My 9-year-old is playing Tears of the Kingdom right now and I've noticed he's getting better and better because I'm not jumping in to help him.

I went digging through some old folders out of curiosity and I still have things I wrote in middle school and high school. (Not code, although I was starting with HTML at the time but that's lost to Geocities.)

Anyway, a bit of an indirect answer to your question but I found a paper I worked on in November 2000 (when I was a junior in high school). The works cited is below. None of the links still work. It could have been completely plagiarized and no one would know!

Fast Facts – Ancient Rome’s Coliseum. 21 Nov. 2000. The History Net. <http://www.thehistorynet.com/HistoricTraveler/grandtour/0996...>

Gladiator. 21 Nov. 2000. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. <http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/0/0,5716,37695+1+3...>

Gladiators. 21 Nov. 2000. The Roman Empire. <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Stage/3591/gladiators.html>

Gladiators. 21 Nov. 2000. <http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/Fountain/5832/gladi...>

Scott, Ridley, dir. Gladiator. Perf. Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Richard Harris, Connie Nielsen, and Djimon Hounsou. Dreamworks, 2000.

Haggard, Cristin. Roman Entertainment, Vicious or Victorious? 21 Nov 2000. <http://www-relg-studies.scu.edu/projects/fal96/1300pm/~chagg...>

Lee, Eugene and Justin Strickland. Roman Gladiators. 21 Nov. 2000. <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/7917/menu.html>

Meredith, Karen. A Contempt for Pain and Death. 21 Nov. 2000. <http://www.omnibusol.com/ancadd2.html>

Downtime / doing nothing is so crucial for letting your brain marinate over a problem or idea! Leave those gaps be.

Option B: Have a side project or personal you're hacking on with Claude/Codex and pop back to the terminal to respond to the latest prompt / get in cranking on the next feature.