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I'm helping my dog vibe code games
- block_dagger 7mo agoA thousand dogs typing on a thousand typewriters...
- namuol 7mo agoNobody cared when I taught my roulette wheel to vibe code :/
- selridge 7mo agoSTREAM THIS
- DANmode 7mo agoBetter content than most streamers!
- worldsayshi 7mo agoDoes it have personality?
- bigbuppo 7mo agoNo, but it rarely shits on the carpet.
- lelanthran 7mo ago> No, but it rarely shits on the carpet. What do you mean "rarely"? It still happens sometimes?
- nine_k 7mo agoDogs 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-how-about-yucca-plants.html https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/26/business/investing-diary-...
- wigster 7mo agogoodbye cruel world
- jama211 7mo agoOh come on, what I see here is whimsy and human creativity! Amazing work by OP
- wigster 7mo agoYou are, of course, correct. I hadn't even read the article tbh. The vibe word is just causing me to spasm these days. ;-)
- keybored 7mo agoIt’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.
- InMice 7mo agowoofwoof
- shervinafshar 7mo agoLove it. No Infinite Cavapoo Theorem needed. Give Momo a week and she'll have DOOM running on her treat dispenser.
- Betelbuddy 7mo agoIn the world of vide coding agents, nobody knows you are a human...
- djrz 7mo agoThe future is so disappointing.
- jama211 7mo agoWhat, people like OP doing incredibly creative and whimsical projects like this?
- stoneforger 7mo agoWho is this helping? What is creative about using their dog as a lava lamp?
- wiseowise 7mo agoYes. 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.
- avaer 7mo agoThis 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.
- cleak 7mo agoIt 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 7mo agoThought this is quoting Karpathy for a second there
- xg15 7mo agosnrf99777655;;+%hn
- Dwedit 7mo agoWhat is this? Did the quadratic formula explode?
- 1234letshaveatw 7mo agobad dog
- oulipo2 7mo agoYet the only thing the dog wanted was a cuddle and a frisbee
- krapp 7mo agoyeah that's capitalism for you. No treats until you provide value.
- octoclaw 7mo ago[dead]
- jpadkins 7mo agoAmazing. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BbPlPou3Bg
- masijo 7mo agoAnd the most HN title award goes to...
- jama211 7mo agoIncredible
- bogzz 7mo agoHow did this get to the top of the frontpage?
- PunchyHamster 7mo agoBy nonexistence of downvote feature
- w4yai 7mo agoIt's funny? I liked it.
- bogzz 7mo agoFunny 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.
- krapp 7mo agoIt's funny because vibe coders and AI artists think the slop they generate is no less the product of their intellect and talent than with human professionals, but really they're doing little more than stirring the entropy pool in a magic box with terabytes of stolen valor from better more talented people. They're no more an "artist" or "game developer" using AI than this dog is.
- the_af 7mo ago> 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. Right, but it also has a "modern art" vibe to it that is fun. Silly, but fun. I think it's more about the initial prompting and feedback loop, the dog itself could have been replaced by /dev/random. "Hacker curiosity" and "intelectual stimulation" are also subjective, but that's what HN is supposed to be about.
- alan_sass 7mo agothis is incredible. we need more projects like this in the world!
- sho_hn 7mo agoAlthough 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.
- InMice 7mo agoFrom everyone needs to "Learn to code" to "Just have your dog vibe code it"
- PunchyHamster 7mo agoBetter figure out how to replace management and HR dept with dogs
- koolba 7mo agoThe next round of massive tech layoffs will be ruff.
- notxorand 7mo agogonna be good stuff tho. dogs are mostly lovelier
- ilaksh 7mo agoIt'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.
- jjk166 7mo agoPretty sure just a drop in replacement would be an immediate improvement.
- sho_hn 7mo agoI for one am all in on DiL (Dog in the Loop) engineering.
- oxag3n 7mo agoReminded 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.
- selridge 7mo agoWasn’t much of a joke then, from the looks of it.
- fjfjjfiffigi 7mo ago[flagged]
- cheeseomlit 7mo 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 7mo agoReally amazing work, congrats!
- with 7mo agothe 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 7mo ago+ Also the fact that the Memory.md file was a hindrance to the quality of output
- cezart 7mo agoDepends on the desired output. The author wanted variability, for which Memory.md was an obstacle. Another project might need consistency.
- cleak 7mo agoIn this case yes, but the real takeaway is to pay attention to Memory.md. If I had a particular game in mind and it latched on early to a style I didn't like, there's no guarantee it would update the memory as I try to change the style.
- otabdeveloper4 7mo 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 7mo agoSimulated annealing for game design
- cardanome 7mo agoNot 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.
- visarga 7mo agoYou can automate Momo with a rng.
- Windchaser 7mo agocan you automate love, visarga?
- visarga 7mo agoNot with bare rng
- 4b11b4 7mo agolol 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 7mo agomeanwhile cats: https://socradar.io/blog/dark-web-profile-blackcat-alphv/ https://socradar.io/blog/dark-web-profile-blackcat-alphv/
- oytis 7mo agoIt has to be satire. Cute dog though
- jimhi 7mo agoOddly relevant for my multiyear project on getting my dog to vibe code b2b saas products https://dogomation.darefail.com/ https://dogomation.darefail.com/
- cleak 7mo agoPretty 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 7mo 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
- pixelpoet 7mo agoWho's a good software developer? [scritches]
- dustycyanide 7mo agohilarious, I'm in the office and had to try pretty hard not to laugh out loud
- pixelpoet 7mo agoMy 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?
- gpvos 7mo agoThe salary and health benefits are essentially treats.
- KolibriFly 7mo agoMomo is. Yes, she is ahahah
- kaicianflone 7mo agoGo 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 7mo agoCould 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.
- funkyfiddler369 7mo 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)?
- Windchaser 7mo ago> mostly just seems like an AI trying to interpret keyspam. aye, but the whimsy is the point!
- anigbrowl 7mo agoYes, 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.
- cleak 7mo agoBoth 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.
- blibble 7mo agolove 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 7mo agoPlease, be real. There will be a Simon Wilison submission linking to his blog linking to karpathy xit. You know, the usual good stuff.
- xantronix 7mo agoHave you any idea what you have just done? You have uttered his name and now he has been summoned. You have doomed us all.
- owebmaster 7mo agoI scrolled this thread fearing seeing that name and a SVG of a dog riding a bike
- dingnuts 7mo ago[dead]
- nine_k 7mo agoEverybody 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 7mo agoThey 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.
- krlatl 7mo agoDogeCode 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!
- funkyfiddler369 7mo 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 7mo agoneed to see one of those dog button press setups but connected to Open Claw.
- amelius 7mo agoAnd the game is ... Fetch that stick.
- zahlman 7mo 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?
- dirtytoken7 7mo ago[flagged]
- rob 7mo agoWarning: brand new bot account (@dang) Comment 1: 2026-02-24T18:45:05 1771958705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140914 Comment 2: 2026-02-24T18:45:32 1771958732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140922 Two "comments" posted 27 seconds apart in different threads in the same formats. Looks like this bot owner saw his first two comments 27 days ago got buried/flagged typing normally and decided to trick us with this new "I'm totally real, look at my lowercase writing!" soft-launch today. Post history: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dirtytoken7 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dirtytoken7
- skissane 7mo ago> @dang @dang doesn’t actually notify anybody. It isn’t guaranteed dang will see it Email to hn@ycombinator.com, someone will see it
- sarchertech 7mo agoThis is interesting because while it’s far from the first bot account I’ve suspected, it’s the first one I’m positive is a bot. I wish it were possible to trace it back to the money.
- rob 7mo agoIt gets tricky because it goes beyond the normal basics of just looking for em dashes or "it's not x, it's y" and stuff. They've already caught onto that. Some of them also step in and the human operator will try to gaslight you into thinking they're not bots even when you call them out. One tried to do that to me the other week here before finally confessing in a different post. The same one where the human operator stepped in also made the same mistake as this one, not configuring their bot to wait long enough between comments. They were rapid firing multiple detailed comments seconds apart. The idea of this one trying to use all lowercase and shorter comments to blend in was a nice idea though. Unfortunately something about it immediately threw me off.
- juleiie 7mo agoTo 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 7mo agoDogs are undefeated at reinforcement learning.
- GTP 7mo 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 7mo agoThat 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.
- FarmerPotato 7mo agoSo the cute lovable dog is an entropy generator. Next: use hot cup of tea as Brownian motion source. Invent infinite improbability drive.
- FarmerPotato 7mo agoSrsly, 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.
- a96 7mo agoRead that as "you need to pet your feedback loop". And, well, yes.
- spelunker 7mo agoI'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?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ilaksh 7mo agoI think you just need more treats.
- _joel 7mo agoDog vibe coding is great and all, just don't use it for red teaming ;)
- cs702 7mo agoEven 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_knows_you're_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...
- funkyfiddler369 7mo ago[flagged]
- SahAssar 7mo agoAre you OK? (Or is this AI?) Either way it'd be good for you to articulate a bit better so others understand.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- cleak 7mo agoThanks 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- sillyfluke 7mo agoA few days before this article was posted to HN, I had commented (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086836 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.
- ramoz 7mo agomy dog had something to say about this: woof woof, woof woof woof, woof woof, woof, woof woof woof
- jccx70 7mo ago[dead]
- aleksiy123 7mo agoI'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.
- aleksiy123 7mo agoI actually found a web version of the god speak. https://jcpsimmons.github.io/Godspeak-Generator https://jcpsimmons.github.io/Godspeak-Generator Maybe another word list would be more appropriate however.
- thatmf 7mo agowhats the carbon pawprint on this lol ...no, actually how many resources were consumed
- yonisto 7mo agoSo... I have 6 cats. I firm believer that no amount of AI will help them produce anything.
- kidsil 7mo agoThe 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.
- cleak 7mo agoMomo 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 7mo agoOne 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 7mo agoI 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies
- CrzyLngPwd 7mo agoThis perfectly demonstrates the absurdity of our current situation around the LLMs and "AI".
- fallinditch 7mo agoExtremely 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 7mo agoNo, 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 7mo agoVery HN-like comment. Really channels Dwight. Made me smile, thank you.
- ryandrake 7mo agoI read it in "Comic Book Guy's" voice, but the effect is the same. Peak HN commentary.
- wiredpancake 7mo ago[dead]
- myvoiceismypass 7mo agoIf my employer stopped rewarding me with treats (and health insurance) my vibe keyboard presses would cease too, if we are being honest :)
- sadeshmukh 7mo agoIt's interesting as commentary, if you choose to read into it as if it were analogous to vibecoding by humans.
- ayaros 7mo agoSo now dogs are going to take my job? What's next? Snails? Rabbits? Wild salmon?
- a96 7mo agoCockroaches. Survivability, fast breeding, low resource needs, quite instrumentable.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- naveen99 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoSo /dev/random would presumably work just as well here too. This is kinda closer to the LLM building a game on its own.
- swordsith 7mo agoThis 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). 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. 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_af 7mo agoThis 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 7mo agoThis 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.
- jama211 7mo agoOf course the dogs input matters, it matters to the fun of this project. Would’ve been way less fun otherwise.
- the_af 7mo agoI don't disagree actually. It is a fun project!
- isodev 7mo agoCute 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 7mo agoWill 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 7mo agoWhat? You are not doing it already? Look at this guy...
- jama211 7mo agoYou 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.
- dakota_williams 7mo ago[dead]
- bronlund 7mo agoMaybe I could make a game after all! You bring hope to a whole generation of lazy developers :D
- sciencejerk 7mo agoOn 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 7mo agoIt's called a sev pak these days.
- akssassin907 7mo agoThe 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_af 7mo agoWe 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 7mo 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 7mo agoClaude 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 7mo agoI 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.
- amelius 7mo agoMakes dogfooding much easier.
- kwertyoowiyop 7mo agoIBM just dropped another 15%, you monster!
- QuaternionsBhop 7mo agoThe 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.
- cleak 7mo agoJust 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 7mo agoAny popular thing with a dog in it is now a rug pull opportunity!
- DalasNoin 7mo agoThere goes all the prompt engineering jobs
- zannic 7mo agoAw Momo's so cute!
- mcastillon 7mo agoBefore 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
- laukhin 7mo 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 7mo agoi'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#$%”..." to "Hello, i am a dog. i will mash the keyboard randomly when i want treats. make a game for me"
- brunooliv 7mo agoWould be really curious to see
- kderbyma 7mo 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_af 7mo agoIf you haven't read the scifi classic "City" by Clifford Simak, please do so! (But your comment hints that you have already).
- eru 7mo agoAuthor should switch the keyboard to Dvorak. Gives more interesting gibberish when mashed.
- nautilus12 7mo agoIf 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 7mo agoVery 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 7mo agoWe were so focused on singularity, it may in fact be who you suspect the least - man's best friend :)
- bizzletk 7mo agoNot 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/ https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/
- AmbroseBierce 7mo agoPretty 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.
- Wowfunhappy 7mo agoI 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_af 7mo agoThe 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".
- Wowfunhappy 7mo agoThe shapes of clouds and positions of stars are essentially random, and yet humans derive meaning from both. I agree you could have gotten the same results via /dev/random, or probably by increasing the temperature on the model, but I suspect doing one of those things is important.
- the_af 7mo agoThe LLM cannot derive meaning in a human sense. The shapes of clouds and positions of stars aren't completely random; there is useful information in them, to varying degrees (e.g. some clouds do look like, say, a rabbit, enough that a majority of people will agree). The mechanism at play here with the LLM is completely different; the connection between two dog-inputs and the resulting game barely exists, if at all. Maybe the only signal is "some input was entered, therefore the user wants a game". If you could have gotten the same result with any input, or with /dev/random, then effectively no useful information was encoded in the input. The initial prompt and the scaffolding do encode useful information, however, and are the ones doing the heavy lifting; the article admits as much.
- fdefitte 7mo agoThe dog ships faster because it has zero opinions about the architecture.
- GreenDolphinSys 7mo agoSeems 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120145
- whoisthemachine 7mo agoThis is amazing. Like circus animals jumping through hoops.
- jccx70 7mo ago[dead]
- jaimex2 7mo agoWow, 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agohi
- textlapse 7mo agoIf 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.
- IhateAI_2 7mo ago[dead]
- bavell 7mo agoWho needs "claws" when you've got paws!
- nineteen999 7mo agoAs 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoI'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 7mo agoregarding 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.
- tabs_or_spaces 7mo agoThis 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 7mo agoSending random noise in, getting a game out. Who wrote what?
- nanobuilds 7mo agoNice 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 7mo agoWe've officially reached peak hype.
- threethirtytwo 7mo agoYou 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 7mo agoFirst sentence we would understand from Dolphins language: thanks for all the fish!
- newan09 7mo agoThis 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 7mo agoits so crazy, people have so much free time that they do random stuff
- ceramati 7mo agoDude was laid off.
- tomleelive 7mo ago[dead]
- VerifiedReports 7mo agoPrompt-code. Not "vibe code."
- MeteorMarc 7mo agoMuseum directors, this is a piece of art. Give this installation its place in history. I have certainly seen worse artifacts in your lots.
- aanet 7mo agoTHIS 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 7mo agoShow 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 7mo agoWe 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 7mo agoThat photo of the dog with it's keyboard is unsettling: the new breeed of software engineers.
- Ronyisonline 7mo agonow we got animals as competition lol
- marcfisc 7mo agoAmazing 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 7mo agoPartisan of randomness here. I never thought it could be as high as that. GG.
- maCDzP 7mo ago> y7u8888888ftrg34BC > Alright, let me decode this masterpiece of cryptic genius... Those three dots made me smirk.
- alflex 7mo ago[dead]
- alflex 7mo ago[dead]
- alflex 7mo ago[dead]
- totetsu 7mo agoI was wondering, what would an AI model that was built to be aligned with an animal species interests, not Humans look like.
- anielsen 7mo agoIt would take a giant corpus og barks and howls, comparable to the entire internet and all books and films to make a doggie-LLM.
- ryandrake 7mo agoTotal 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?
- gpvos 7mo agoIf you worked for Meta you probably have some money left over.
- simoncion 7mo 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
- ryandrake 7mo agoI 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.
- embedding-shape 7mo agoAs someone who lived off my savings for the last 5-6 years, I'm glad you cannot see my balance :) And also I learned that apparently my life is a raging fire, fun! :)
- throawayonthe 7mo ago
- cantalopes 7mo agoIt is a dog prng!
- larodi 7mo ago[flagged]
- dang 7mo agoThis 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- larodi 7mo agohow 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...
- dang 7mo agoThe comment implied that someone was responding to their life difficulties by making a dog suffer. That's a huge personal attack, and the added snark was an amplifier.
- redbell 7mo agoThanks 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 7mo agoThis 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 7mo agoForget k8s, k9s incoming... :D
- canto 7mo agoI'm having a mixed feelings about this xD
- aronhegedus 7mo agoHaha, was a great read, loved the picture of the dog at the keyboard!
- gpvos 7mo agoIt 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 7mo agoEvery man and his dog can vibe code.
- zettie 7mo agoWith some luck and scraping "y7u8888888ftrg34BC" might one day replace Solitaire in Windows.
- shayankh 7mo agoexactly the kind of thing that the CEOs want to hear
- shayankh 7mo agojust the kind of thing CEOs want to hear
- refsys 7mo agoCute, 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 7mo agoYou 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#user-input https://github.com/cleak/quasar-saz/blob/master/CLAUDE.md#us...
- dminik 7mo agoGiven 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 7mo agoIf 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.
- KolibriFly 7mo agoThat episode aged way better than expected
- KolibriFly 7mo agoOverall 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 7mo agoNot 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 7mo agoHow I am slowly killing my dog with too much treats. (is joke)
- eden-u4 7mo agoThis is basically a diffusion model: start from a random seed, use a generative process to transform it into something
- jindou 7mo agoThe 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.
- jccx70 7mo ago[dead]
- badcryptobitch 7mo agoDon't give this to a schnauzer.
- advael 7mo agoDam, 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
- krupan 7mo agoAre 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.
- advael 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoFoolishly, 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 7mo agoIt’s the first time GIGO stands for “garbage in, games out”. Bravo!
- timothyduong 7mo agoSelfh.st writer said this guy was the dev for Huntarr repo crash out. /s