YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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.

Hopefully AI might actually make it easier to be more ambitious with unique art styles, should the developer choose to do so.

(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.)

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 still 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.

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 think “the youth” are going to grow up with a Cambrian explosion of styles, mashups, callbacks, revivals, etc.

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.

AI is amazing at style transfer, and so there’s a huge payoff for exploring and learning references to existing artists.

(I also think copyright will die pretty soon for similar reasons, that’s a separate take though.)

> about 320M tokens read from cache, 19M written to cache, 1M output

320 * $0.2 + 19 * $10 + 1 * $40 = $294

Couldn't you have been downgraded to 4.8, since direct reproduction of existing games classifies as unsafe?

It can create something like DX ball easy, because its already there, the AI already knows what it is

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

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

I couldn't care less about AI-generated games, but such restrictions are just destroying the value of proprietary models. Even more frustrating is that it so far hasn't been considered illegal to steal all the information for training the models, but now it's becoming illegal to ask for these same models to output this information back.

give it a link if you want

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.

The games that do well, like literature, survive because they touch the soul.

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".

Stuff that AI generates sorta feels like that. Meaningless and synthetic.

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.

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.

Its funny that the same CS saying "garbage in garbage out" seems even more true in the AI modern day.

Though, now they will never stop asking for more and more. OOP may have opened Pandora's box. :)

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.

So the 'winners' will be whoever fills the resultant vacuum in the economy. That will probably 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.

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.

That's one of the things that got me into learning to write code in the first place.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What impact did being able to take a picture have on the mental development of children?

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.

A century later kids are still happy to draw things.

Do we, or our children, ever learn to farm, mine, chop wood, lay bricks, make operating systems, or program in assembly language?

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?

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.

(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...)

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.

_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.

On the other hand, I’ve got two issues with it:

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.

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.

I mean, to be honest, that seems like a fun craft for a thing to do with kids!

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.

Thanks

People on this website are so comically short sighted.

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.

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.

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.

I'd be more specific and state that these models are now way far from being LLMs and instead they are full blown agent orchestration systems capable of running multi-layer ReAct loops and tool-calling, and with your whole session history as context. It doesn't make any sense to refer to them as glorified chatbots as the LLM part is nowadays far from being the component that delivers the highest value.

I spent so much of my youth building things that were far beneath what I wanted to be building because it took all my time/energy/attention/expertise to build the lesser thing.

It's a far better deal to saturate your time on the high-level stuff building the ambitious thing you really want to exist. e.g. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/-quot-the-door-problem-...

He's been publishing his work at https://waitinggodot.in/

My younger one has been creating little things on a microbit using the block based environment online. He's enjoying it too.

My watercolours still impress people enough to get requested even though they're fairly mediocre.

I can't imagine not being impressed by something made by _the person that I created_ because a machine can spit out a neater version of it.

That’s like saying they will never impress anyone by discovering a continent

That ship has sailed

Built himself? Well, designed by him and built in his home workshop. Some of it done by him at least with his assistants. They had a home chef too of course who gave the kids a bowl of stuff to mix during prep. The model railway involved design work that was more like commissioning 3D prints and model assembly. Input on the design really, as a lot of it was handled by assistants. Assistants assisting assistants based on prompts and review and feedback. Everything was custom and bespoke and made in his vision. Almost the entirety of the labor and craftwork were outsourced.

This person was a great leader — or “orchestrator” in the language of agents — but a lot of his accomplishments boiled down to having the physical world equivalent of a massive token budget: money and staff.

The great scientists of the 19th century, the ones whom we named fundamental units after, had skilled craftsmen who cut precision screw threads and blew perfect glass for them. Major scientific leaps are written up on papers authored by department leads et al. Les chefs célebres of the world front a kitchen filled with skilled staff supporting the name over the door.

If your work can be done on a computer though, AI can provide you with a Python line cook or a C++ glassblower of your own, so you can’t just show us your perfectly julienned potatoes or evaporation flask and expect us to praise anything other than your wallet, and your ability to motivate robots to do your bidding.

And now too the impressive demo isn't going to be just making an interactive or multiplayer game which anybody can do with a single prompt, but creating something that's actually interesting/fun. Interestingly enough this now overlaps quite well with the sort of stuff that could be monetized today. That's why I think LLMs are going to throw a curveball in the economy in ways many aren't yet appreciating.

Adults are also desensitized to impressive deliverables. We see it even among peers who barely bat an eye when someone goes above and beyond to deliver a feature. The toxic ones even try to downplay your achievements by throwing around claims that your deliverables were vibecoded.

I along with most of HN probably had a new idea every month for a game or software back in the day. 12 year old me could only dream to maybe work on something tangential to them in the next twenty years or even a lifetime. Now i could prototype most of those ideas as i thought them up and really get into the promising ones.

I feel like i was born too late and missed out, straight up jealous of the possibilities in front of the kids willing to take it

If they made it the old way, without LLMs, I guarantee most parents/teachers who have real (pre-2025) programming experience will still be impressed.

Are kids doing photography also not impressive because smartphone cameras all default to full-auto, computational processed modes? Obviously not. You can still stand out just by giving more effort and being more detail-oriented. The average smartphone photo taker doesn't even know how to utilize focal lengths effectively.

You're in a bubble. Go look at what actual kids are doing. Only the actually extemely motivated/smart ones are generating playable full-multiplayer games from raw code (AKA not in another game's sandbox); even with claude/codex.

Its like saying there is no reason to hand draw anything since computers can generate a better picture. My kids love drawing, painting and other physical endeavors. Of course we don't drown them in screens, we may fail them somehow in future but not like that.

They don't need to impress a parent/teacher/peer, life kinda sucks if you search for or need external validation. Especially if, as you say, someone's own creation is overshadowed by something 100x shinier.

There are countless examples of things where your kid is going to get walloped by comparison. So, don't compare. Make the effort to meet them where they are and praise them for their effort and focus and passion, not their output. Judy and Elroy will be okay as long as you realize kids and their needs don't change much even as the world does.

This is always true.

Huge numbers of people are going to spend billions of hours playing GTA6 though, and that won’t be scarce once it finally arrives.

This is just a lack of ambition. LLMs allow one to make far more sophisticated games than ever before, even as a single developer, and if doing so development still takes many months even if running an agent 24/7.

I can relate to this, today when I play games I do still try to get them 100% complete but new generations do not seem to appreciate that. I see that they complete the game with minimal hours and move on to the next one.

This is why we have to go to Mars.

That's subjective.

What makes or breaks just about any indie game is a brilliant core loop, or on the other end of the spectrum a novel "feeling" / aesthetic. Latter especially visible in the horror genre. Then after the original, there's the tail of variants that can do pretty well for the next 6 months of so, and it's exhausted, which is the part AI affects the most as of now.

There's countless examples of indie games crafted with care over multiple years, with great looking (but sort of bland) graphics, that have not done well.

Further, even before AI, a lot of people whose games didn't make it, did not at all have a grasp on what counts as a finished and well crafted game. Same applies to music. It's clearer in sports where (for example) the insanity of a marathon ran in 2:00-2:10 is easy for all to see.

Even if it's exactly the same, for a kid week of fun feels like life formative experience because it is. For adult a week of fun passes almost instantly because time itself is perceived differently. And you are back to baseline which might feel depressive if your baseline is not great.

- call stuff that isn't AI "AI" to make more money

- call stuff that is AI "not AI" to make more money

Meaning builders usually fare better than meaning seekers.

Short story inspired by Culture series of Iain M. Banks uses at some point example of building a house in the afternoon.

The happiness belongs to people that to the wuestion about meaning can cheerfully respond with "I've got a patio!".

https://youtu.be/-aRw80iPvC4?is=HaTU48bJUHlhh4yl