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Shepherd's Dog: A Game by Fable
- sixhobbits 4mo agoEnjoyed playing it, here's the direct link to play as otherwise you have to click from the article to the GitHub and then find the correct demo link https://vnglst.github.io/when-ai-fails/shepards-dog/claude-fable-5/index.html https://vnglst.github.io/when-ai-fails/shepards-dog/claude-f...
- vnglst 4mo agoThanks for that, I messed up copying the links into the article!
- esailija 4mo agoI didn't even have to play. Immediately after opening, some notification about rotating my phone is obscuring the instructions and I cannot read them.
- fennecbutt 4mo agoDamn I couldn't load it on my Nokia n95 from 2007 either. Damn bruh, these silly devs should make this stuff work on everything.
- esailija 4mo agoI am on a flagship samsung that runs for example the Red Alert 2 browser port well. OP is just pushing slop, the 80% part anyone gets for free. (well 20 bucks)
- jna_sh 4mo ago“ can it build a game idea I've had for years, in a single shot?” Do people do no research or introspection when they’ve had an “idea for years”? There are countless examples of this exact game. I played this on the Gameboy Advance! There’s like 50 of them on the App Store right now. The standard “this almost certainly exists wholesale in the training data” applies, but I’m also interested in how you carry an idea for years and don’t notice this, or whether the “idea” here was actually “using this thing that’s been remade thousands of times as an AI benchmark”. There’s nothing wrong with remaking an old classic formula, especially in game dev. It’s the describing it as “an idea I’ve had for years” that rings weird.
- redrobein 4mo agoWhile I agree that it isn't revolutionary that it could implement this from a single prompt, what's surprising to see is how well done this one is compared to the other tries. The controls and movement are smooth, the animations aren't jittery, the ui makes sense, there's a clear progression in difficulty. This model clearly "understands" the implementation of this game far better than the others did.
- nmstoker 4mo agoYes, this subtly seems worth noting. That smoothness suggests that even if many of the concepts are common/non-original, the bringing together of various pieces in a form that works well on modern mobile browsers is still impressive - browsers are moving targets and even if there are open source versions of this, it's comparatively rare they'd get continual care and attention to stay fully current (unless implemented via an o/s engine)
- oh_my_goodness 4mo agoStill, if the code for multiple similar games is in the training data, then that's worth thinking about.
- vnglst 4mo agoI also realized this, a quick Google search would’ve told me that this game has been made several times before, also way before I ever had this idea. Apparently it’s a pretty obvious game idea. Ah well, it’s still fun and it does appear to measure how good AI is in creating these kind of games.
- dools 4mo agoWell … it’s a measure of how good it is at reproducing a game that probably already exists in multiple forms in its training data.
- 4mo ago
- hbarka 4mo agoThat’s one tired sheepdog.
- vnglst 4mo agoThis was my second attempt, I'm still learning! Besides, the wolf was freaking me out.
- defrost 4mo agoAlways fun having a go, mind you Michael Nyman had some thoughts on all this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xn1_vUe_Vws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xn1_vUe_Vws For interest, some shepherds run two dogs, each on a different whistle or voice command pitch.
- tbreschi 4mo agoBrilliant marketing here in the title
- fennecbutt 4mo agoLooks kinda like "Sheepherds" which came out recently. However as others have pointed out the idea is a common one, probably because many people are exposed to sheep and sheep dogs and farming. Which further reinforces a previous point I made that all human work is derivative and barely anything actually original. But that's why it doesn't matter! Make that game/app/website that someone else has made before, make your own interpretation! The beauty and uniqueness is in the skin not the flesh!
- totetsu 4mo agoI’m sure I saw a blog post about this same mechanic being made by llms back a year or so ago too
- totetsu 4mo agoWell it was the same person at least https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43360648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43360648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43298945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43298945
- zkry 4mo agoBut isn't getting an LLM to n-shot something just going to produce non-unique, non-original interpretations of an idea?
- stephbook 4mo agoPlaying on iphone13 mini. It instructs me to rotate my phone. The pasture doesn't get any bigger, but now the top bar blocks half the screen. The tooltip about rotating stays in the middle of the screen. Unplayable. There's a music note indicating sound, but I never heard the dog bark. It's exactly the kind of unpolished slop I expected it to be.
- thih9 4mo agoThe article’s title seems needlessly dramatic, the article itself doesn’t reference the LLM’s danger. The title could have been just “Shepherd’s Dog: A game by Fable 5”.
- vnglst 4mo agoNot sure if it would've gone to the front page of Hackernews with that title! I was also trying to make a little fun about the drama around Mythos/Fable: Even though Fable did this really well, to me it does not appear to be fundamentally different from other top models.
- dakolli 4mo ago[flagged]
- hurtigioll 4mo agofunny how a worthless LLM belongs to the fastest revenue growing company in the history of Capitalism
- ps3udo 4mo agoCan you provide any source for that claim? Thanks!
- hurtigioll 4mo agogoogle it. this article from one month ago is already obsolete, annualized revenue grew from 30 bln to 44 bln in the last month https://venturebeat.com/technology/anthropic-says-it-hit-a-30-billion-revenue-run-rate-after-crazy-80x-growth https://venturebeat.com/technology/anthropic-says-it-hit-a-3...
- techpression 4mo agoBecause others are paying for it. It’s a lot easier to get revenue when you don’t have to care about CAC or paying the bills.
- ciscoriordan 4mo agoMy Belgian Tervuren and I have a basic herding title and about 4 years of herding experience. The sheep movement is excellent. You could make it even more realistic by having them favor lusher areas and by having one occasionally bolt spastically (hard mode?) A handler mode where you play as a human and shout commands at the dog could be cool too!
- kunalBOOP 4mo ago[dead]
- disillusioned 4mo agoCome by!
- entropie 4mo ago> My Belgian Tervuren and I have a basic herding title and about 4 years of herding experience. Do you happen to have any videos of a Tervuren doing actual herding work or competing in herding trials? I was apparently under the wrong impression that Tervurens are no longer bred for herding. My girlfriend just told me that there are still dedicated herding lines, but when I started looking into it, I could hardly find any footage. Compared to the thousands of videos of Border Collies working stock, there seems to be very little material available. I'd also be interested to hear more about what your dogs are like. Are they from a specialized herding line? Do you see them as being closer to the typical working Malinois - very intense, high-drive dogs with a strong prey focus - or more like a blend of the classic German Shepherd and Border Collie traits? The latter type, at least in my experience, can make excellent everyday companions as long as their owners know what they're doing and provide enough mental and physical stimulation. The reason I'm asking is that I've been considering getting another Malinois. I used to own a fourth-hand Belgian Shepherd who eventually turned into a reasonably good everyday companion, but it was a long and sometimes difficult road. There were also certain situations where he could never really be trusted. He also had a habit of finishing arguments that my Pointer started in a very Malinois-like fashion, while my Pointer was generally too stupid(and proud) to learn anything from that experience. Feel free to write a wall of text if you feel like it.
- nickandbro 4mo agoI sure do miss Fable. It just knew how to do things and do them well. Sad it’s now blocked.
- willtemperley 4mo agoI wonder if this is the real problem: it was too good, and a lobby of companies feeling threatened by the competition decided to push the jailbreak narrative as a scapegoat.
- evilturnip 4mo agoI think it’s impressive that an LLM can take you to a local maxima in one-shot. But once you start maintaining it, improving it and fixing bugs, you’ll eventually need to rip it apart and put it back together again while understanding how it all works. This is why I think the better approach isn’t to one-shot but to have the architecture in your head and build it up piece by piece, with the AI accelerating the code writing.
- dools 4mo agoI’ve found it very easy to maintain, add features to and fix bugs in software I’ve written entirely with LLMs, and in languages and frameworks with which I’m unfamiliar. You just ask the LLM to explain the code and then work with it to come up with the fix.
- ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo agoHow big are those projects.. I dont think this is good for your mental health or physicaly your brains health. Problem solving keeps your brain strong. The laziness in us is inclined to take shortcuts, don't do it. Its like driving your car 3 blocks instead of walking, your physical health will suffer.
- dools 4mo ago> How big are those projects Define big I guess. They're non-trivial, mix of internal enterprise tools, a multiplatform app (android/ios/mac/windows/web currently headbutting its way through review), including a billing system for my small telecommunications business. > I dont think this is good for your mental health or physicaly your brains health I find the experience of doing it without writing the code to be intellectually pretty similar. I still solve a lot of problems, the LLM couldn't, for example, one shot the event sourcing model I built for synching data between devices. It took quite a few iterations and I had to define a lot of the architecture, but I did it at a level that wasn't "here is a class, here is a module, this module does XYZ", more at the "whitepaper" level or describing how specific bits of the app needed to work in order to solve some problem. It's also very similar to managing other developers. > Its like driving your car 3 blocks instead of walking, your physical health will suffer It's more similar to having staff rather than doing everything yourself. The problem solving just shifts to a different area, and you get more done.
- CarRamrod 4mo agoBAA VRAM EWE
- wg0 4mo agoNow next game - The Boy who cried wolf! Wolf!
- ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo agoForces me to rotate to get warning message to disappear (works fine on portrait, but regardless forces me to play with two hands..), when rotate doesnt even fit on phone. fROnTEnD DeV Is DeAd DeSiGN Is DeAD Cool idea tho, could be a fun game if if the UX wasnt so hostile.
- isoprophlex 4mo ago"a game idea I've had for years" Bruv, there are already countless games with this exact mechanic...
- chvid 4mo agoAs far as I can tell it is possible to get this sort of quality game with a properly tuned harness out of one of the cheaper models.
- PUSH_AX 4mo agoIn which harness?
- andrepd 4mo agoHe should ask AI to tell him that #aaa text on #eee background is not acceptable.
- ernst_klim 4mo agoWhen you say €20 worth of tokens is it fair direct API call price or subsidized claude code?
- vnglst 4mo agoDirect API access I’m afraid, it was not my intention to spent it all in one go on this. But after 12€ I didn’t want to stop anymore
- AnotherGoodName 4mo ago[dead]
- bloomark 4mo ago> It's really fun and exactly how I imagined it. If this is what you imagined, you need to imagine better. * Pathfinding is terrible (if I end up inside the fenced area clicking outside doesn’t lead me out). * Forcing me to go landscape while not even filling the entire screen is terrible (where did you even test this). * Controls are disastrous (I’m either barking all the time or a bark makes my sprite ignore my movements). You one-shotted this, and I will admit it’s incredible that these agents can create something like this in minutes. But your statements along with the “most dangerous AI model” in the title are disingenuous. Please do better.
- _pdp_ 4mo agoIf you sit down and write that game by hand you will not only finish it in a week but also learn a lot of things along the way and perhaps even discover something about the game and you did not imagine. That is how programming works. It is a search problem. Also this is a game has very simple mechanics I am sure you can generate as easily with Cursor or some other tools.
- thih9 4mo agoCursor has access to the latest models so it should be equivalent, right? Or is there some other AI usage described in this article that is not supported by cursor?
- _pdp_ 4mo agoI don't use Cursor so I mentioned it as slightly impartial suggestion but my point is broader. I hear and have seen results from others using Composer 2.5 which is only available in Cursor.
- pnut 4mo agoMore deeply than programming being a search problem, programming is a means to an end. If the end is a combination of education and product discovery, then yeah maybe, although those are also dimensions of personal productivity that can be amplified by leveraging AI tools. If the end goals of programming is leveraging computer automation, then nobody actually cares how the automation infrastructure gets established, and the less distractions with low value implementation complexity, the better.
- momocowcow 4mo agoSo it created a trivial game that a teenager could’ve built as a part-time project while acquiring deep knowledge.
- Levitating 4mo agoHumans can do lots of things, I don't see how that's relevant. This post is about AI progress.
- da-x 4mo agoCurious enough, I tried the same prompt with Qwen3.6-27B. One shot produced a game with no sheeps. I had to told it to fix two bugs then. Overall, the graphics and games seems good enough and better than most of the closed models that were shown. However, not surprisingly, falls short of Fable. I've put the index.html and open code session here: https://github.com/da-x/when-ai-fails/tree/qwen3.6-27b/shepards-dog/Qwen3.6-27B https://github.com/da-x/when-ai-fails/tree/qwen3.6-27b/shepa...
- vnglst 4mo agoWould love a PR with this!
- raincole 4mo agoThere were dozens (if not hundreds) of more complex games made by Fable on Twitter the first day it was released. The only reason this is on HN frontpage is the stupid clickbait title. Some random examples: https://x.com/fe_yukichi/status/2064635098411180374 https://x.com/fe_yukichi/status/2064635098411180374 https://x.com/akiraxtwo/status/2064780732082651402 https://x.com/akiraxtwo/status/2064780732082651402 https://x.com/kieradev/status/2064482704763085202 https://x.com/kieradev/status/2064482704763085202 https://x.com/VincentLogic/status/2064699740936356065 https://x.com/VincentLogic/status/2064699740936356065 https://x.com/XiaohuiAI666/status/2064994538591223911 https://x.com/XiaohuiAI666/status/2064994538591223911
- franze 4mo agoNo, the reason is that it is a follow up on a (multiple) threads march last year and shows the progress of ai.
- GuestFAUniverse 4mo ago(Exaggerated:) Guy who would never pay 20€ to another dev for such a game, pays same amount for AI. Applause to Anthropic: mission accomplished!
- ashdnazg 4mo agoThat's no surprise, telling the AI what to do is basically the IKEA effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
- djeastm 4mo agoThere's always been a premium paid for custom work, though. OP just paid off-the-rack prices for a custom-made suit.
- Ouman 4mo agoThe "world's most dangerous AI" framing is funny here because the result is basically the least dystopian use case imaginable
- rcarmo 4mo agoPretty great game, am having some fun
- Andrew_nenakhov 4mo agook, after playing this game, I started respecting shepherding dogs' skills even more.
- shmoil 4mo agoYeah, but can it one-shot Sven Bomwollen?
- djmips 4mo ago2002 - a strange game!
- deadbabe 4mo agoIt’s sad that someone can think about a game for years and never really spend the time to just build it out. This is a very simple game even a CS student could build for an assignment. But now we’re supposed to be impressed an AI can one shot it for $20 dollars.
- helterskelter 4mo agoThis game need a "bah-ram-ewe" cheat code where the sheep dog turns into a well-mannered pig who politely asks the sheep to return to their pen.
- root-parent 4mo agoBut all this was in the training data no? https://github.com/Nuno1123/chaser https://github.com/Nuno1123/chaser https://github.com/tee-lab/collective-responses-of-flocking-sheep-to-herding-dog https://github.com/tee-lab/collective-responses-of-flocking-... https://shoze.itch.io/sheep-game https://shoze.itch.io/sheep-game https://store.steampowered.com/app/3006280/Sheepherds/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3006280/Sheepherds/ https://ameiswhattodo.itch.io/sheepy https://ameiswhattodo.itch.io/sheepy
- syx 4mo ago[dead]
- ofjcihen 4mo agoOh wow, this is just a straight ripoff of that last one isn’t it? I feel like this is a recurring theme. Someone posts about one shotting something and then it’s revealed that you could also have one-shot it buy git cloning the repo it’s based off of
- deadbabe 4mo agoThe real point of these posts is karma farming. Posting a good one shot is worth at least a hundred or so upvotes. People need to recognize this for what it is and ignore these kind of things.
- weirdhacker42 4mo agoWhat can I buy with all of my karma?
- iugtmkbdfil834 4mo agoOddly, I wonder if this is not a great benchmarking prompt.
- andai 4mo ago45 minutes and $20 ? You can make it in 5 minutes with DeepSeek! I even did it for free in their web chat. https://jsbin.com/sigesemeyi/edit?html,output https://jsbin.com/sigesemeyi/edit?html,output DeepSeek Flash was also able to do it, even with reasoning disabled, but Pro gave much nicer graphics. Your Fable version is prettier though! Edit: And has better gameplay. And sounds. OK, nevermind! Fable wins this one :)
- jm_l 4mo agoIn this version, the sheep all get stuck in the corners and edges. This doesn’t happen in the Fable version.
- andai 4mo agoThe Fable version has some kind of "gravity" that pulls the sheep together. Some of the other games mentioned here use fancier flocking mechanics (like boids!) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48518518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48518518
- pixelesque 4mo agoLove the: > // Sky-like background comment for the ground! :) No doubt most of the training data is for sky...
- andai 4mo agoUpdate: I've been having a lot of fun asking various models to make this game. > make me a simple html5 canvas game, top down, where you play as a dog who herds sheep into a pen I like Gemma 31B's version (free model on OpenRouter): https://jsbin.com/mufirivixo/edit?html,output https://jsbin.com/mufirivixo/edit?html,output
- uuuuunnnuuu 4mo ago[dead]