“ 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.
Looks 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!
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.
My 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!
> 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.
I 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.
Exactly this! People think the one shot gets them to 95% complete on an implementation of their vision. Issue is, it actually gets you the AIs vision adjacent to what you want, and coercing that into the actual implementation you want is now 95% of the work.
This is really no different from working with humans. A visionary founder has to spend tremendous effort to get their engineers to will a vision into existence. This will be the key skill with AI.
Forces 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.
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.
If 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.
Curious 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:
There 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.
41 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 53.1 ms ] threadhttps://vnglst.github.io/when-ai-fails/shepards-dog/claude-f...
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.
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!
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.
The title could have been just “Shepherd’s Dog: A game by Fable 5”.
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!
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.
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.
This is really no different from working with humans. A visionary founder has to spend tremendous effort to get their engineers to will a vision into existence. This will be the key skill with AI.
fROnTEnD DeV Is DeAd
DeSiGN Is DeAD
Cool idea tho, could be a fun game if if the UX wasnt so hostile.
Bruv, there are already countless games with this exact mechanic...
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.
Also this is a game has very simple mechanics I am sure you can generate as easily with Cursor or some other tools.
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/shepa...
Some random examples:
https://x.com/fe_yukichi/status/2064635098411180374 https://x.com/akiraxtwo/status/2064780732082651402 https://x.com/kieradev/status/2064482704763085202 https://x.com/VincentLogic/status/2064699740936356065 https://x.com/XiaohuiAI666/status/2064994538591223911
Applause to Anthropic: mission accomplished!