"one-shotting" is fun for a low (human) effort toy, but it's a mistake to get overly hung up on LLMs getting everything right on the first try, since a lot of that is the harness and the internal prompting that makes it burn extra tokens to test everything to get it in that one "shot" (ui turn).<p>While it's nice that LLMs are getting better at arriving at the desired deliverable with fewer surprises (or broken things) doing it is not necessarily a sign that the model is actually smarter, just an indication that what you are doing is likely a well-trodden path for the model, the RL and the harness.
But one shot prompting does not mean one shot testing. I see continually that Fable can design and test prototypes before committing to a design goal and testing multiple layers until the goal is reached. Many of the tests are code unit or integration tests that can be re-used without token spend.
But for how long?<p>I have a personal benchmark suite that runs a bunch of difficult algorithmic problems in 3 tiers: vibe coded prompt (just a few sentences), vibe coded prompt plus a description on what the solution will be evaluated on, and finally a fully specc'd prompt that leaves little space for interpretation.<p>The current Fable models are approaching a level where the -eval runs perform systemicallty better than the "clear spec" runs. (And right now its just Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 that behave so well, all the other models I tested - all the OpenAI and the leading Chinese models - work better with clear specs). I'd encourage everyone to experiment a bit; I am running my serious workflows with labourious force-me-through-all-the-design-questions mode, whereas my hobby projects, some of them hard, I am trying to see how much I can get away with with vibe-grade prompts. My conclusion is, with Fable its starting to look like what Vibe coding was promissed to be a year ago - a magical box that generally does things very well.<p>Btw, congrats to the OP -- the game is enjoyable and I played a few levels. I dont remember when I last played any games for more than 5 minutes. Good stuff.
My experience has been that cruft accumulates and creates back pressure via growing token usage.<p>The APIs aren’t clean, which creates indirections to other parts of the codebase to check on leaking abstractions. It doesn’t learn, though, so you pay for those indirections every time (right now, anyways).<p>I’ve not been impressed with its ability to clean that up with a generic “make it gud” kind of prompt. I have to point it at something crufty, but it will fix it then
I definitely remember a game I played for more than 5 minutes recently. A lot of those were <i>not</i> AAA(A) games but rather indie or previously-indie-now-got-a-publisher-to-notice games. None were "AI one shots" that just built something that looks like a re-skinned version of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge", which I'm sure is pretty abundant in training data? And that was a great game btw!
My dad asked recently if AI is good enough to create something like DX Ball - a breakout style game we used to play a lot.<p>Opus 5.5: <a href="https://claude.ai/artifact/UuT7P936dU1XoPByYZ7xyD" rel="nofollow">https://claude.ai/artifact/UuT7P936dU1XoPByYZ7xyD</a>
Fable 5.2: <a href="https://claude.ai/artifact/UszKFvuonWAT5psjMttAEg" rel="nofollow">https://claude.ai/artifact/UszKFvuonWAT5psjMttAEg</a><p>There are some areas in which Fable is clearly better but subjectively the Opus 5.5 version feels more fun.<p>Both are one shots, Opus 5.5 was done a few weeks ago before they added "guardrails" around recreating games. Fable 5.2 changed some game mechanics despite my prompt asking for them to be the same as original game.
I am kinda new to this -- how is this deployed in claude website?
In my 2 minutes of testing I liked the gameplay elements from Fable 5.2 much better. I think Opus 5.5 sound effects may have been a bit better but that's it.
I think there is an important difference here.<p>It can create something like DX ball easy, because its already there, the AI already knows what it is<p>It can not create a game on the same level as DX ball, something new i mean, not a mechanic added on top, a real new game that feels like a game that would have come out the same year as DX ball<p>AI is great at executing the task, but it can not for its life (or for the anthropic reputation, it seems to care more about that) create something new from scratch, it can not do game design thats not just change the speed of the ball or the paddle color. Probably a limitation thats there from the start
> Fable 5.2 changed some game mechanics despite my prompt asking for them to be the same as original game.<p>Couldn't you have been downgraded to 4.8, since direct reproduction of existing games classifies as unsafe?
I used my $200 free fable 5.1 credits to build a WhatsApp sticker maker, it created a version I was not happy with, but it burned the 200 in one sitting. Node.js app, vue frontend, etc.<p>I didn't used the project a lot since I kind of hate it on how much was spend.<p>Last week I used just a little bit of my $20 pro account to build a replacement with rust end to end, just to gain some experience with the rust hype. Very happy with the result, not perfect but snappier, and even better: a single executable, I no longer need to fire up a backend and front service separately.
I have experienced this myself, although the novelty kind of wears off after a while. It is still fun to make small games to co-op on the TV.<p>Yes, hard to believe but most of these games can be almost one-shotted in my experience, with bugs but still playable. We are not talking about some properly made games but imagine for a second that there are some number of casual players out there that wont mind spending 30 minutes on a game for just a bit of fun and having these just materialised just in time is a lot more convenient then hunting for them on the app stores.<p>For anyone interested, I put all of of my work into an open source tool that uses your iPhone as a console which then can cast on your TV. Up-to 4 local players supported. It can even run proper games via WASM. It is Apple Silicon only.<p><a href="https://usenoodle.app/applet/" rel="nofollow">https://usenoodle.app/applet/</a>
I prefer Aiden's drawings TBH
What does one-shot mean in this context? Aiden (the main character)'s walk cycle is kind of a mess and its also the animation that a player is going to see <i>all</i> the time.<p>It appears to be eight frames, but after taking a closer look, I found that they don't seem to be consistent [1]. Using ControlNets and various other strategies, you can definitely build out a "nominally acceptable" walk cycle [2], but you still have to do some manual work.<p>[1] - <a href="https://aidens-revenge.pages.dev/assets/characters/aiden/animations/w/walk/spritesheet.png" rel="nofollow">https://aidens-revenge.pages.dev/assets/characters/aiden/ani...</a><p>[2] - <a href="https://mordenstar.com/other/hobbes-animation" rel="nofollow">https://mordenstar.com/other/hobbes-animation</a>
The article clearly explains what the author/their nephew did. There is no ambiguity. One-shot never means 'so perfect there is literally nothing to be improved.' It means no back-and-forth iterations between the human in the loop and the AI.
- In traditional ML/vision, it meant learning to recognize a new category from a single training example.
- In LLM prompting, it has always, at least the last seven years, meant giving the model one example in the prompt (zero-shot, one-shot, few-shot).
- Vibe coders/AI-influencers use it to mean "one-shotting" a task on the first try with no back-and-forth.
One shot is confusing precisely because it means different things in different contexts.<p>It can either mean: 1 prompt, or it can mean a prompt with 1 example (in which case zero-shot means 1 prompt with 0 examples).<p>It also has different meanings in other contexts.
That seems less like an issue of the term having multiple meanings and more an issue of people misusing the term frequently.<p>People misuse the term "literally" frequently, for example, but that doesn't change the meaning of the word.
The article includes the entire prompt OP used in the first section. I think it is pretty clear.
One shot: One prompt; no need to interfere or make further modifications after it is done. You are totally inspecting other parts of the game. Not the same meaning.
Ignoring all the positives & negatives surrounding this technology for a minute, this is an amazing outcome for the kids.
Kids? Forget the kids. This is awesome for everybody. I'm busy making 'adult games' (not that sort) that I always wanted to make, but lacked the artistic/sound/etc competence to do so. And while I hope to make a buck off them, I don't even really care. Even if somehow they failed, in the end I'd have stuff that I wanted but always lacked certain skills to complete.<p>I don't think people are yet appreciating how much LLMs are going to change the world, especially not the doomers. People are just jamming the present into the future, with greater efficiencies. But it's nonsense. The cost of cognitive work will approach $0 which is going to send the raw value of cognitive output to something close to $0.<p>So the 'winners' will be whoever fills the resultant vacuum in the economy. That will <i>probably</i> be a mixture of social, physical, entertainment, and other such domains. But it's all so hard to predict. We've lived our entire lives in a completely agrarian society, and we're seeing the advent of the Industrial Revolution. It's easy to predict super-farms, but those aren't going to be the 'real' winners.
The 'winners' will be the holders of capital, same as always, but it will be giga-gasoline on the fire. The rest of us will be dancing monkies for the owner class if we're lucky.
> This is awesome for everybody<p>...except people who actually enjoy games and want high quality games to play, of course.<p>Down here in reality, platforms like Steam are being absolutely flooded with generic, ugly, low-quality AI-generated games, which are not only drowning out the human-made games people actually want to play and making it impossible to find them, but are also preventing them from being sold entirely in some cases due to human reviewers not being able to keep up with the pace of new game submissions[0].<p>So, thanks for your contribution to that, I guess.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valve-admits-its-running-behind-on-approving-steam-games-because-it-has-to-keep-re-reviewing-them-which-surely-has-nothing-to-do-with-ai/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valve-admits-its-run...</a>
Agreed. Could you imagine? Those kids must have been so stoked!<p>Though, now they will never stop asking for more and more. OOP may have opened Pandora's box. :)
its insane, to actually get a custom game made for you for your birthday, that you enjoyed? wow... never thought id see this happen.
Positive little kiddo gets more screentime!!!! Yaaaaaayyy!!!!!
Negatives: we either are annihilated by AI or enslaved by technocratic feodalism living in a worse conditions than 1800s mine workers. Uau
I appreciate the token breakdown, but how much would this cost in money? Chatgpt estimated $400 to $600, but I don't have enough knowledge of token pricing to know if that's accurate at all.
Yeah, it would have been expensive via the API; the tokens were free when I tested it, but it would have been something like $300 USD for the Claude tokens at Fable 5.2's API prices.
Fable is $8/$40, with cache reads at $0.2 and cache writes at $10, so you simply calculate based on the info from the blog:<p>> about 320M tokens read from cache, 19M written to cache, 1M output<p>320 * $0.2 + 19 * $10 + 1 * $40 = $294
I quickly dove into the game and then got lost as I couldn't exit and had to spam keyboard to see the controls. The menu refers to "Punch" but it wasn't obvious what key that is (and it wasn't "p"!).<p>I see that ENTER pauses, but may I suggest also making ESC and/or P pause. And then the pause screen showing or linking the keyboard controls and an exit path.<p>(Caveat: I'm not much of a gamer so maybe the current controls are standard? Anyway, I feel like it could be more inviting to casuals with something like the above.)
This is awesome, but I don't get the repeated use of the term "one-shot". There were many human-driven requests and iterations, and this is illustrated in the blog post.<p>This really was more like a normal person had access to a game developer team (with artists and musicians) and had a custom game built based on interviews and playtesting.
I disagree. Fable didn't make any mistakes and created a completed game with zero guidance, so it's a one-shot. If additional requests come up afterwards, it doesn't detract from the initial execution.
That is my definition of one shot as well. I consider the app I made "one shotted". But by that, I mean each feature is a single shot. The app is a collection of over a hundred of those shots..and counting.<p><a href="https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-one-shot-prompts/" rel="nofollow">https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-one...</a>
This is both cute but also a bit sad in terms of game stylization, I guess these generic AI designs could become so normal to the youth that in the next 10-20 years it just appears everywhere
I’m going to go out on a limb and predict the opposite.<p>I think “the youth” are going to grow up with a Cambrian explosion of styles, mashups, callbacks, revivals, etc.<p>Right now a vibecoded game just uses the generic style. But you could easily imagine the kid saying to Claude “rebuild this game but in the style of that old show [Samurai Jack | Ren and Stimpy | … ]. We are so early in the tech curve, market penetration is still very low, and the “creator-years” in the medium is tiny; it’ll be 10x in a year if not more.<p>AI is amazing at style transfer, and so there’s a huge payoff for exploring and learning references to existing artists.<p>(I also think copyright will die pretty soon for similar reasons, that’s a separate take though.)
That was already happening before AI, with in-house game engines dying off and all converging on the same quasi-realistic style and often the exact same assets.<p>Games used to have very unique, noticeable styles that you could instantly place from a screenshot. Now everything just looks like Unreal, Unity, or generic 2D.<p>Hopefully AI might actually make it easier to be more ambitious with unique art styles, should the developer choose to do so.
You can change the stylization with LLMs. I think what we're seeing is simply any barriers to code/design/art/music/etc completely going away.<p>But those barriers going away now means that the starting point is much closer to where the finish line used to be. Like a few years ago this would have been an upper tier beat-em-up. I think we're still early enough in the window that I'd <i>still</i> call this upper tier, but the reality is that it's also now something that an uncle can vibe code for his nephew over a weekend.<p>In general I think this is going to be very good for everybody, but it's going to completely destroy the software as a problem-solving industry, and make the software as entertainment industry much more competitive.
I'm kind of hoping that the youth will recognize that stuff that can be made with AI is just nothing special anymore, and find something that is (or still is) special. I don't know what that is, maybe something that AI can't do on a fundamental level (maybe something physical?).<p>(Of course, at this point it might be necessary to point out that "the youth" is a diverse bunch, and some will be like this and others like that.)
The thing I’ve noticed is that if anyone can do something, many will. And then, like always, the challenge will be in doing something unique.
What if they find it special because they build memories with the AI games they play? Is that something you hope doesn't happen?
don't really think there will be anything - this is an entity that can learn anything (even physical things) faster than any human or the collective of humanity for that matter.
I've found analog photography to be a rewarding hobby, and although an LLM can help me refresh my memory, the overall experience is certainly not something that an LLM can replace.
Yeah, it can "learn" anything except how to have a fulfilling emotional connection
This style reminds me of those mobile game ads with helpless characters that need YOUR help not to freeze or something. Probably the exaggerated facial expressions.
Or the small Battle Wagon around the height of a child quintupling in size the next frame. Kiddos having fun is the main mission though :)
This nephew game is indistinguishable from 90s arcade game styling.
What I wonder reading that would be how much more effort to actually port it to the PlayStation, or whatever game console. I recently asked my local AI to make an ebook reader for my Gameboy pocket ;) I just think about all the cross collaboration of devices for stuff we can only imagine.
> I must admit I never tested this with Opus 5.5, so I'm not sure whether this was possible before Fable 5.2 rolled around.<p>Since somewhere around Opus 4+ it's been really good enough to do these things, but 4.6 was the most pivotal version since a 1 million token context window can allow a model to fit so much "in its head" basically.
It’s a lot of fun to build games. I started building little pieces of one[0], then a builder for it, then a story, then a video recorder. And there’s a lot more iterations in the roadmap. It’s great as a creative outlet<p>It’s not one shotted anymore or course. But in the process, it’s also cool one-shotting new features or experimenting with variations of things very quickly<p>Eventually it becomes similar to any longer lasting project. Complexity starts creeping in, maybe technical debt, and managing everything to keep it consistent/coherent slowly starts taking most of the time. And I’m not maintaining it for real active users, which would also become some other type of project<p>0: <a href="https://id-le.com" rel="nofollow">https://id-le.com</a>
This is phenomenal. Great work, dude. Man the fun my brother and I would have had in the old days with this stuff. It looks absolutely fantastic.
Reminds me a bit of Little Fighter 2.
I noticed this recently with Opus 5.5: you can tell it to "make this more fun" for a game project and it... makes it more fun.<p>It's neat (if unsurprising) that Fable 5.2 has this ability as well.<p>My loose testing shows other models aren't quite as good at this yet. Here's the prompt "Build a mobile-friendly three.js game where a mouse has to hide from a cat" by Opus 5.5 Extra - <a href="https://claude.ai/artifact/RRyEndXLSPQbcig3BgzgCZ" rel="nofollow">https://claude.ai/artifact/RRyEndXLSPQbcig3BgzgCZ</a> - and by GPT-6 Extra High: <a href="https://squeak-and-seek-mouse-1027.simonw.chatgpt.site/" rel="nofollow">https://squeak-and-seek-mouse-1027.simonw.chatgpt.site/</a> - the Claude one is a better game, even though they look very similar at first glance.<p>Update: took it about 40 minutes but here's Fable 5.2 Extra's attempt at the same prompt: <a href="https://claude.ai/artifact/Agsqbng2MnkTPAU67it87o" rel="nofollow">https://claude.ai/artifact/Agsqbng2MnkTPAU67it87o</a><p>I wrote about Opus 5.5's sense of fun in more detail here: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/28/vibe-game-development/" rel="nofollow">https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/28/vibe-game-development/</a>
It's crazy how even the intro text to the Fable 5.2 Extra's game still reeks of AI. Like, wow, the models can make a game that almost makes sense, but still can't write text that sounds remotely like a human was involved!
I’m waiting until I can give AI a <i>link</i> to a Macintosh garden game and ask it to be reimplemented in the web browser.
"find all documents, descriptions, walk through of game XYZ, generate a consistent and declarative document that another agent would read to recreate the game without using existing IP or protected data, do not reuse art but describe general details with the ability to extend and add specifics later. focus on functionality first, then mechanics and then later art and gameplay. generate a 10 page document that will follow MVP to Production quality gameplay"<p>give it a link if you want
Based on what I've seen, there's a good chance this would work today (though Anthropic recently added some restrictions around this sort of prompt) -- try it!
Just a small suggestion on the prompt. I usually also add something like "Bring in a critical Art Director, Animator, UX Expert, Staff Engineer. Don't release the game until they all agree it's AAA quality." I wonder if that would have helped with some of the issues/bugs others called out. I do this with Codex and it's been working really well and not using many tokens.
I tried the game and in some seconds noticed I can kick the enemies forever if I put them close to the left corner. I'm feeling now that I'm the AI exploiting bugs.
jfc people on here don’t like to have fun. This is one of the best applications of AI I’ve ever seen. It is <i>allowing</i> for creativity — the kid drew all the bosses, thought out the progression of the game, and now gets to see it come to life. How many times as a child did you fantasize about a video game you wanted, and all it ever was was a fantasy? How goddang cool would it be if it was made real? How much more would that make you want to continue imagining and creating? It is touching — the game incorporates all the members of his extended family, even his passed-on great grandmother who appears as an angel character. How many of you even know your great grandmother’s names? Now his is living on eternally in his awesome video game. It is something this kid will be talking about to all his friends at school, and reminiscing on with all his family when he grows up. Who cares whether the code was made human or a machine? Let the kids have some fucking fun
Crazy good
This sounds so.. dull.
funny enough it's also the only model afraid of creating a 3d mesh with pikachu photo on a 3d benchmark i work on<p>"I can't recreate Pikachu since it's a copyrighted character, but I can build an original toy critter in the same spirit: a small chubby four-legged figurine in a charging pose with its own design. I'll start on that now."<p><a href="https://sketchagent.dev/s/6KH2LwSq" rel="nofollow">https://sketchagent.dev/s/6KH2LwSq</a>
Is Pudding the dog (unlocked after beating the first boss) supposed to shrink anytime it jumps? I guess even Claude-turned-world-class-game-developer isn't immune to bugs. ;)<p>Honestly, setting all the oft-cited AI caveats aside, the end result is cute and perfectly serviceable as a game for the kids. I can't imagine how stoked they were about playing it.
AI pixel art still looks awful I see
Did anyone notice that the game characters looked nothing like the drawings lol
i button-mashed my way through the first level and, what can i say, this is kind of dream i have when i spend my days button-mashing my way through side scrollers.<p>when i was between about 6 and 8 years old, i used to have this same dream about travelling through space, feeling the tranquillity of the celestial orchestra, and then whizzing down to feel the speed at which they were actually moving from a completely different frame of reference.<p>there was a sense of fullness and emptiness at the same time, raw power but also serenity. as though everything was coming into being and going out of being at the same time.<p>i always woke up feeling mystified but full of wonder. I carried that sense of wonder with me through many days and it always came back to me when i looked up at the stars and felt myself on the edge of this sphere, zipping through space at hundreds of miles an hour, but only seeing the tiny twinkling of stars as evidence of this enormous cosmic play.<p>but i suppose getting revenge on the goons by kicking and punching them, in order to save puddles, is basically the same
Cool! Fun! Derivative.<p>Nothing wrong with derivative but of course it's going to excel in well trodden areas.
My dream game is Tetris. I would be concerned if an LLM couldn’t <i>ahem</i> “one-shot” that.
This is back with Opus 4.1 when I was still amused with these things. It definitely took better part of two weeks of intense non-stop prompting, but I wanted to see how far I could go with just prompting for everything (now called vibing) when this became viable <a href="https://www.susmel.com/stacky/" rel="nofollow">https://www.susmel.com/stacky/</a> (press h for help)<p>Turns out, you could go far but you never lose that AI touch to it which I find absolutely horrible and (s)tacky, albeit technically impressive to be able to do that by not touching any code whatsoever.
It's not as good as Street Hassle on the Commodore 64.
AGI.
> Make it one of the best games you can possibly make. You are a truly world-class game developer.<p>Top Jobs in 2027:<p>1. LLM glazer.
Ooooof the results here are <i>rough</i>. A very young child might find this charming, but I think it's kind of embarrassing. Like, the walk cycles alone are. Yeah...<p>To say nothing of ur word shaders, inconsistency in the characters, questionable gender stereotypes, etc.<p>This definitely tells me that AI definitely isn't there yet.
It's a one-shot. Iterate and you can make magic happen. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiWKfq4niC8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiWKfq4niC8</a>
This is a bizarre complaint. There's plenty to complain about with regards to you know, normalizing kids consuming AI content, giving a gift from a slop machine instead of something hand-made, etc. But come on. The game itself is insanely impressive <i>for</i> something generated in one prompt from a bunch of doodles (cool doodles, but still!) If a single human hobbyist dev created this in a few days we wouldn't call it "kind of embarrassing".
Cue the "What did it cost" Thanos meme
I want to ask this as politely as possible, because you set out to do something nice for your nephew and he had a good birthday.<p>The first thing I felt when I saw this post was concern on the impact of this type of thing on the mental development of children. For example developing specific skills like drawing, and general emotional skills like concentration and learning to be happy with their own skill level.<p>I respect it was a light post where your aim was probably to highlight something fun, but I couldn't see any note of what you thought about it.<p>What do you think about that? What do his parents think?
Yes, these are great questions, and I appreciate your politeness.<p>Basically, I think it's okay to have a bit of fun playing AI-generated video games at your techie uncle's house, and their parents agree. And for what it's worth, Aiden drew every character and boss himself - the game was built from his drawings.<p>My nephews are otherwise very active, learning music, martial arts, and other sports. But when they visit, I let them play games in between other activities. My parents refused to let me play any video games at home, and I still think that was really lame. Video games are another art form to be appreciated - they just need to be enjoyed in moderation.<p>Generally, though, I worry about the future and the potential for cognitive decline that comes from having AI agents do everything. I don't have a good answer here, except that I suspect we'll have to intersperse AI use with periods of deliberate daily cognitive struggle to avoid decline.
I'm not OP, but it seems to me that LLMs offer extraordinary access to new skills and information to the uninitiated. Someone who has a positive experience creating a game like this is only a question away from learning details of how it was implemented, the language used, the architectural choices and rationale, etc. The LLM is a competent tutor in all. What I would have given as a child for such access... I had to make due with the help docs, and an occasional book from the library.
> "<i>...only a question away from learning details of how it was implemented...</i>"<p>That question will never be asked and we all know it. It's been demonstrated time and time again that the masses prefer entertainment to enlightenment and it is still being demonstrated today by the high rate of AI assisted cheating in high schools and colleges.
When I was a kid I did not understand what Game Genie "cheat codes" were doing, but it did not stop my curiosity and ultimate understanding of what was happening behind the scenes. This feels like the next iteration and I know _some_ kids will ask questions.
> That question will never be asked and we all know it.<p>I asked that question today. After years of working in Unity, I finally downloaded Unreal and spun up a quick game literally so I could poke around how it was implemented, and have been asking questions nonstop about what, how, and why things were implemented with a hands-on experiment.<p>Lots of people won't ask that question, but also lots of people most certainly will.
Worse. IF they DO ask the question, the answer is now<p>> You prompt a LLM and it just happens.<p>The bar for enlightenment is now further away as people are taught to expressively stop chasing it.
> That question will never be asked and we all know it.<p>You and I know different children. Mine give me the opposite impression. The questions have no end. I think that's a good thing.
why should they learn it? for what purpose? We used to learn these things so that we could use that knowledge to create more. now there's no reason to learn it, other than pure curiosity.
Why should you learn anything? Because it helps you ask better questions, and gives you more and different experience to draw connections between things and situations and ideas. It lets you do more stuff, and doing stuff is fun.<p>Having recently sat with a bunch of non-coders who decided to play with Claude Code—they learned more in an afternoon than they had in a lifetime, just because it was <i>fun</i> for it to get them to a thing they wanted. Versus months of drudgery and study as the price of entry (and an end result that would probably be super janky compared to the consumer products on offer to them).<p>I learned some about carpentry by reading, and by watching videos. I learned <i>much more</i>, much faster, by picking up bits of wood and tools and just doing. I did little dumb stuff that was trash but that was <i>mine</i>, and that was satisfying enough that I did more, and before I knew it I’d backed my way into picking up some scraps of proper technique.<p>And now so many more people with a vague itch can “just do” in relation to software systems.
I mean. Nerds have always existed and will always exist. But, the last couple of decades, it's just been fashionable to "be nerdy". They're faking it. So you're right: Most people won't. But there are reasons why people think people should or would, even if those reasons are wrong. I'm very cynical in my advanced age about peoples' willingness to learn things. All those "go into STEM" efforts aimed at little kids are just fluff. Most people don't enjoy learning. They hate it. Most people just want to watch TV in bed. AI is an amazing teacher, but most people don't want to learn. They're averse to it in their bones. It's like that t-shirt with the picture of french fries on it that says "not everyone can be an astronaut": Yeah well not everyone can be a nerd.
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Can you please stop posting curmudgeonly comments, shallow dismissals, and even personal attacks (e.g. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50433292">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50433292</a>)?<p>These things are against HN's guidelines, and you've unfortunately been doing them repeatedly. This is not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.<p>If you wouldn't mind reviewing <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a> and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I was a kid, and I have 2 of them. My experience has been kids curiosity works top down, not bottom up. As such, instant gratification turns into curiosity or wanting a slight variation or whatever, and bit by bit they learn.
Are you sure?<p>The kid is doing game design with hand drawn sketches and game mechanic, as now he has his own team of software engineers and artists to make his vision a reality.
I’ve been hand coding a contra-style game with ours, and also importing their drawings as all the monsters, it’s incredibly exciting for them to see their work going right into the game. Highly recommend it.
Let the kids get burned out on vibecoded vidya slop. Maybe they'll get bored enough to start playing outside again.
I first learned to program in middle school with Logo, and the extent of that was "telling the commander" (or whatever the term was) what to do in almost plain english.<p>That's one of the things that got me into learning to write code in the first place.<p>As long as the child in question gets to explore their creativity like this and it instills that sense of learning and diving deep then I'm not sure there's a problem here.
>The first thing I felt when I saw this post was concern on the impact of this type of thing on the mental development of children.<p>What impact did being able to take a picture have on the mental development of children?<p>Recording a moment went from something you needed a court painter and two weeks to do, to something that everyone could do with the click of a button.<p>A century later kids are still happy to draw things.
Counterpoint, I think it’ll get them more into making things, because they don’t have that big frustrating period where their output is nowhere near as interesting as the giant smorgasbord of interesting stuff being pushed on them constantly. I’d much rather they spend their time making stuff with AI than passively consume the garbage streaming on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon 24/7, which was the status quo with my generation. Making can now compete on instant gratification with all the other stuff now.
When you buy your kid a cake for his birthday, do you think that it's hurting the development of his baking skill, because now he knows cakes are something that he can just hire someone to make with money?
I mean… it was a birthday present. Everything in moderation, and there are a lot of ways to involve the kids in the process more.<p>I definitely have some concerns about AI, but I would much rather my kid is actively involved in the game design process than playing the “buy more gems to level up!” casinos in the App Store wastelands.
I don't think this effects the kids more than playing any other video game.
> <i>concern on the impact of this type of thing on the mental development of children.</i><p>Do we, or our children, ever learn to farm, mine, chop wood, lay bricks, make operating systems, or program in assembly language?<p>Does that affect or limit your or your children's ability to eat food, sit on chairs, sleep in beds, or use computers and phones?
> Do we, or our children, ever learn to farm, mine, chop wood, lay bricks, make operating systems, or program in assembly language?<p>Speak for your own childhood buddy
Yeah I for one make my children design and code every video game they play by hand. And before you ask, yes, in assembly.
the crazier possibility is that little kids' drawing skills - whatever pedagogical value that has, i agree that it has some - may stop improving, but there might be way more videogames authored by them that turn out to be really good.
My dream game is a high fidelity universe as detailed as GTA 6 or Red Dead Redemption 2 and as expansive as No Mans Sky.
You're really letting your kid down here by outsourcing an opportunity to be creative and collaborate to Scam Altcoin.
People are really out there naming their dog Doggo, huh?
does anyone else worry about future generations growing up on ai slop? because i wasn't until reading this post. now i'm terrified.
I worry about them never having the satisfaction of working hard on something and truly creating something that is their own. I definitely sound like a boomer (even though I'm a millennial) when I say this but I totally believe that limitations breed creativity. The AI here is just looking at stuff artists from the 90s laboured t create for Arcades and made its own slop version. But then again, one could argue that Mario Paint let you create slop too back in the 90s. Yet, at least with Mario Paint you had to actually hustle quite a bit arranging pixels or musical notes to have something. There was effort and difficulty with overcoming a learning curve and that effort paid off with the creation of something you could be proud of even if it wasn't professional. But here, on the other hand, even a badly generated prompt still gets you a lot.<p>There's like, no challenge. Reminds me of that one Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place To Visit" where a bank robber dies after getting shot by the popo five-o and he is greeted by a man (angel like guy) who takes him to a cool mansion or house where he fulfills everyone one of the guy's wishes: women, money, gambling, etc. etc. And he gambles all day long and never loses but after a while he gets bored and then depressed that he always wins and there's no effort and no risk, and then tells the angel dude that he wonders why he was put in Heaven and that he thinks he doesn't belong there and wants to go to the "other place" only for the angel guy to tell him he is in fact in "the other place".<p>Stuff that AI generates sorta feels like that. Meaningless and synthetic.<p>So in a sense, I don't worry about generations not necessarily having hardships like us, cause, look at us, we don't write in assembly code like other folks had to do. But on the other hand I do worry that AI is basically removing all manner of human touch and the satisfaction that comes with suffering to generate that human touch.<p>I suppose there will be suffering later when you want to polish things, but it will be a different, more frustrating kind of suffering. The kind where you don't know what the hell the LLM did and don't even know where to begin.
No.<p>I have been slopping out games for years now. The graphics don't matter unless the gameplay does. The gameplay doesn't matter if the game is too hard or too easy.<p>The games that do well, like literature, survive because they touch the soul.
They are already growing up on slop. Look at brainrot and Roblox games, and YouTube shorts. This will fit right in with what they're used to. They won't even notice.
Every generation believes the next generation is growing up on slop.
Remember 2025 when we thought future generations growing up on tiktok was going to be bad? Can't wait to see how 2027 will ruin society even more.
You registered an account called “slopinthebag” 9 months ago, but you weren’t worried about this until you read this post?
Most games and shows for kids have been slop since long before AI.
Who says it has to stay slop? Nobody is forced to stop at the single, first iteration of something. They can see the outcome, play the game, and then iterate faster than any professional game dev studio could in the past.<p>Its funny that the same CS saying "garbage in garbage out" seems even more true in the AI modern day.
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Some parts of this seemed cool, and others made me terribly sad. I am not sure how to express it beyond - I really think inserting hulk as a character was a mistake as you don't have any chance of having intellectual property rights to the character.<p>On the other hand, it's very much like you photocopied some comic books, cut them out, and did a little home theater thing with them (only with even less effort on your part).
I agree with you. It’s cool that this tech exists and that something this complicated can be something that regular people have access to.<p>On the other hand, I’ve got two issues with it:<p>1. The result gives off the AI slop vibe. It’s like the 2026 version of bitmoji. You can immediately tell this is AI art, AI music, AI game.<p>2. Art made with AI always feels gross. It feels like substituting creativity. At least when you use AI to make a CRUD app or automate some tedious process there’s an excuse. The time spent doing this could have been spent actually making art. Maybe it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good or complicated art, but it would have been authentic.
The kids don't mind, and when the generation grows up with this, they won't mind. Unc will be sitting shouting at the clouds about some IP or art style, story as old as time.
Unc can be right about some things, and sometimes younger generations regret certain aspects of progress.
They won't have time to mind, they'll be too busy performing manual labor in service of their digital feudal lords.
> On the other hand, it's very much like you photocopied some comic books, cut them out, and did a little home theater thing with them<p>I mean, to be honest, that seems like a fun craft for a thing to do with kids!<p>I share your general ambivalence though. The generic openai-looking art is kind of gross. At the same time, iterating with a child so they have to think about feedback, how could this be better, what do you like, what do you not like - that's a meta-engagement that's probably positive at some age brackets.
Reminds me of how I can probably make the Team Rocket playable terror cell game I always imagined without needing to worry about its economic viable or liability<p>Thanks
Who cares about IP rights for a one off game you made for your nephew? Are you worried your nephew won't be able to publish it on Steam? I could imagine reasons this could make you sad, but disney's IP isn't one of them.
The art is really bad. There's no easy fix for this: today's image models are simply not good enough yet. You can use models for coding, they're good at that thanks to RLVR, but the art still has to be done by humans.
> Fable 5.2 one-shotted my kid’s dream movie,
> Fable 5.2 one-shotted my kid’s dream song,
> Fable 5.2 one-shotted my kid’s dream storybook,<p>None of these work, except video games, something qualitatively different about that art form, IDK.
Could you even call it "working" for video games, based on the result, for the same kind of reasons you'd say it doesn't work for those other media?<p>(To qualify the rest of this, clearly it's job done in terms of the author wanting to make something memorable for their nephew - it's quality uncling, with the best of intents - but in the context of how what's been shared is going to contribute to the discourse around AI, in the shadow of a new model release, during an ongoing pre-IPO hype bubble...)<p>I'm seeing something which has has the surface-level features of a belt scrolling beat 'em up, but it's missing the result of all the different types of work that would normally happen through "make it actually interesting and enjoyable to play" design and iteration, e.g. you can walk through every stage unchallenged mashing punch, there's no evidence from the 2 stages I played of an interesting mix of enemy types with unique AI which can combine in ways which add challenge and variety to a belt scroller, you can stand and basic punch the first boss to death stepping aside only for its AOE attacks, the second boss infinitely spams a running move when it reaches low health and sometimes bumps into the edge of the screen behind it.<p>_Something_ was one-shotted, sure, but what we expect of a belt scrolling beat 'em up that someone cared enough to finish and release wasn't, not that people who will point at this in the near future as evidence of "OMG new Fable can one-shot games" will care.
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