Even a dog can vibe-code! And the apps kinda, sorta work most of the time, like most apps vibe-coded by people!
I'm reminded of the old cartoon: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."[a]
Maybe the updated version should be: "AI doesn't know or care if you're a dog, as long as you can bang the keys on on a computer keyboard, even if you only do it to get some delicious treats."
given how many people have improvements they'd like to see in even the most complex software that was written by people who are usually further left or right of the belly of the bell curve, I can't help but wonder what you mean by
> vibe-coded by people!
"We worked years on that!" ... decades, really, slowed down by your cutesy little bossies and their share (hand) hodlers ... which someone digging a ditch or even Da Fucking Vinci way back (hundred of years) when didn't have a problem with with ...
Thank you for the good laugh! This whole thread is peak satire.
Although, be careful. It reminds me of the foreword to a shortstory someone shared on HN recently: „[…] Read it and laugh, because it is very funny, and at the moment it is satire. If you’re still around forty years from now, do the existing societal equivalent of reading it again, and you may find yourself laughing out of the other side of your mouth (remember mouths?). It will probably be much too conservative.“ — https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___...
You're right. They did it. The old man and dog joke has been realized, but the real answer of the future turned out to be: "the dog programs the game, and the man feeds the treat hopper."
Everybody and their dog will be doing it. Actually, the dog will be in charge. Dogs are loyal, enthusiastic, and require less office space. With their endless desire to play and to please, they will take over the game development industry.
In the meantime, the financial industry will be taken over by cats.
It helps to picture some sort of extraterrestrial saying this. Maybe someone like Alan Tudyk in "Resident Alien". It makes much more sense than to assume it's a human being saying these things.
the real takeaway is buried at the bottom: "the magic isn't in the input, it's in the system around it." random keystrokes producing playable games means the input barely matters anymore. we're basically at the point where the engineering is in the scaffolding, not the prompting.
This matches what I've been finding building AI-integrated systems. The persistent memory, behavioral constraints, and feedback loops around the model do more for output quality than any prompt optimization ever did.
The dog experiment takes this to its logical conclusion — if random keystrokes produce playable games, the "intelligence" was never in the input. We spent two years obsessing over prompt engineering when the real discipline was always system architecture. The scaffolding isn't supporting the AI — it IS the AI's capability.
That also shows the delusion of some people that believe their vibe coded projects have any value.
If generative AI improves at the rate that is promised then all your "promting skills" or whatever you believe you had will be obsolete. You might think you will be an "AI engineer" or whatever and that it is other people that will lose their job, that you are safe because you have the magic skills to use the new tech. You believe the tech overlords will reward you for your faith.
Nope. You are just training your replacement.
No one will buy your game that you vibe coded. If the tech were good enough to create games that are actually fun then they would just generate their own games. Oh your skill? Yeah, a dog can do it.
Yes people will cope by saying but oh the whole initial prompt and setting it all up was still hard but yeah currently. The tech will improve and it will get more accessible. So enjoy the few months you are still relevant.
Of course there is reason to believe that you can't scale up LLMs endlessly and bigger models hit diminishing returns. In fact we might already be seeing this. So there is an upside but then again when the AI bubble pops and the economy crashes you will be out of a job all the same.
Not that I condone any form of gambling but I would rather play actual slot machines instead of spending hundreds of dollars on tokens in hopes that the AI blesses me with anything useful.
Extremely clickbaity title that actually isn't clickbait because it happens to be a straight up description of the article - excellent post, how can one resist?!
No, the article’s title is definitely clickbait. The author didn’t teach his dog to vibe code games (that’s what the title on the blog is) – he taught his dog to be rewarded when he types random keystrokes on the keyboard. The vibe-coding is inconsequential – the dog doesn’t play the game, he’s just in it for the treats –, the author just wants the attention because he gets people to believe the dog DID vibe code.
It will stop being clickbaity if the author decides to let his dog respond to stimuli related to the game he’d be building with a feedback loop.
I can imagine a camera-based input that would help detect the wagging of a tail, or continued interest in the visuals as an indicator of doubling-down on a given feature.
The dog could actually vibe code a game to their liking, but with the wrong input (a keyboard) it's a missed opportunity.
Pretty neat! I actually ran across that right before publishing - I didn't want to see what was around until after I had the whole thing locked in. I love the novel input!
The buried insight is right: if random keystrokes produce playable games, the input is basically noise and the system is doing all the work. We've evolved past the point where intent matters. That's either the most exciting or most terrifying thing about where this is all heading. But I am glad I am sitting in the front row watching this all happen, especially a dog vibe code!
> Hello! I am an eccentric video game designer (a very creative one) who communicates in an unusual way. Sometimes I’ll mash the keyboard or type nonsense like “skfjhsd#$%” – but these are NOT random! They are secret cryptic commands full of genius game ideas (even if it’s hard to see).
Your job: You are a brilliant AI game developer who can understand my cryptic language. No matter what odd or nonsensical input I provide, you will interpret it as a meaningful instruction or idea for our video game. You will then build or update the game based on that interpretation.
Here's what you should tell your coworker the first day on the job if you get hired to do something you know nothing about :D
That is a very succinct way to describe what it feels like to have a job that is cleaning up vibe code. Maybe (just maybe) I'd understand if this was a prototype from someone with zero budget. But you just know they are going to continue to "prototype" once they being you aboard. And many will complain about how slow everything goes because they are used to their fast iterations off of unscalable code.
Its frustrating in an interesting way. With other aspects like machine language people quickly understand that this isn't sufficient for a proper transition and compromise with it. Code being more nebulous doesn't get that grace.
Could this be done better with one of those dog button mats? The concept is interesting, but, it mostly just seems like an AI trying to interpret keyspam.
Both my dogs have actually learned to use the button mats. Down selecting to the right responses seemed tricky. My wife also took away the mat since Hana (the larger one) never learned "all done" and would paw at the "walk" button until she got it out and carried it around.
Yes, I was hoping for a system where Claude was informed it was communicating with an unusually intelligent dog whose ability to communicate was limited by dog anatomy, and that the AI would not to hold the dog's interest with its output.
'nuff to run most governments nowadays (Europe and US come to mind. 2026 and they have the Space Programs of DIY youtubers with money, whaaaat) so why wouldn't it help a dog helping his dog vibing game(s)?
I think this is fun. I'd like to try with my cat, although training cats is an impossible endeavor...
I'm smart enough to enter gibberish myself without another animal, tough.
It's actually extremely similar: the agent has to figure out a way to associate the next logical steps with the (often disconnected or nonsensical) directives the executive gave them.
It might be a little easier with a dog though. With a dog, you just give it treats and it doesn't care how you interpret what it typed.
One can technically scrape a list of actual advice or quotes off the internet, randomly feed them to a coding agent, and ask it to interpret what they mean in the grand scheme of things and implement away on it. Once the agent is done, it randomly responds with either "yes, this is exactly what I meant" or "no".
In turn mimicking the average game industry executive giving vague directions that feel just right to them this month, or some other unspecified time period, and in turn achieving something closer to the real AAA game development lifecycle.
It does. Claude seems to do the best with this prompt. Codex 5.2 struggled with UID generation and kept ending its turn with things like "And now you're all setup to run tests!" without actually running them. A better (and shorter) prompt could probably get a lot out of Codex.
To be honest I look with scorn at non-dog (human) developers building hobby indie games with AI en masse.
Let me explain.
The nature of the indie game development is pouring your love into a project and thinking about passion first and monetary incentives second.
Noone is thinking "I will make this game and it will make me filthy rich" or if they do they are... strangely minded.
It's like 'mass produced AI local craft'. Oxymoron in itself. Worst of the two worlds.
Where I see AI is empowering single developers to craft things they couldn't before. Not some small slop factory pipeline where you release game after a game everyday drowning steam in your 6/10 slop.
No. This should be ostracized and condemned.
What is proper beneficial to everyone usage is producing a game that is the size and scope that was unachievable for you before.
This is what I am doing. This is how AI is meant to be used. To empower us doing things that weren't achievable for us before.
Obviously dog produced games get a huge endorsement man and get a pass.
I've been trying out vibe coding with my 4 year-old, but they quickly lose interest once we start getting into the "weeds" of implementation. Hey kiddo, which CSS library should we use for your web game?
DogeCode incoming. People here are already talking about the scaffolding. Let OpenClaws provide the scaffolding and let the dog operate the prompts at $5 per day.
This is a billion dollar idea! No humans. No revolt. No guillotine. Just profits!
Sounds like open communism. No chance, buddy, it's either less or more viking, but not just viking. Pick a camp the profits are for or get surrounded by trashy turd nuggets even Ronald felt enough pity for to give them some poourpes
Cute but also: a small village has their lights flickering whenever Momo wants a treat. Also, you can actually play with your dog and give them treats instead of tasking a random text generator with that bit.
I've been having this thought about how generally people say that llms cannot create novel things.
Say writing an interesting or novel story.
And was thinking about if feeding in prompts of random words, along with prompts grounding from a simulation would sort of push the llm into interesting directions for implementing an on demand narrative story.
A sort of randomized walk with llm.
I remember watching Terry Davis with this random word generator in his terminal that he would interpret as the voice of God.
Will we ever get to a point where LLMs just churn out random apps with no input required and human reviewers just go through the apps picking out which ones might be useful for business purposes and monetizing them?
This is an extremely cute, cool and fun experiment. Kudos.
That said, I wonder: does the dog input matter? It seems this is simply surfacing Claude's own encoded assumptions of what a game is (yes, the feedback loop, controls, etc, are all interesting parts of the experiment).
How would this differ if instead of dog input, you simply plugged /dev/random into it? In other words, does the input to the system matter at all?
The article seems to acknowledge this:
> If there’s a takeaway beyond the spectacle, it’s this: the bottleneck in AI-assisted development isn’t the quality of your ideas - it’s the quality of your feedback loops. The games got dramatically better not when I improved the prompt, but when I gave Claude the ability to screenshot its own work, play-test its own levels, and lint its own scene files.
I'll go further: it's not only not "the bottleneck", it simply doesn't matter. The dog's ideas certainly didn't matter, and the dog didn't think of the feedback loop for Claude either.
This fun exercise might actually be extremely insightful as a educational vehicle around AI and intent.
It can also help combat the excessive emphasis on any "end to end" demo on twitter which doesn't really correspond to a desired and quality sought outcome. Generating things is easy if you want to spend tokens. Proper product building and maintenance is a different exercise and finding ways to differentiate between these will be key in a high entropy world.
> I'll go further: it's not only not "the bottleneck", it simply doesn't matter. The dog's ideas certainly didn't matter, and the dog didn't think of the feedback loop for Claude either
Absolutely. The scientific test would to put any other signal and look at the outcomes. Brown noise, rain, a random number generator. whatever.
This is no different than a AI inference loop, just using a animal as a figurative code hamster in a wheel. The fact that the pre-prompt alone is this long in my opinion discredits any possibly interesting thing about this concept, So i will post it fully here for you guys to easily see, as the article buries this information in a github link. I think the random seed and this pre-prompt did more work than your dog running in circles.
System Prompt:
Hello! I am an eccentric video game designer (a very creative one) who communicates in an unusual way. Sometimes I’ll mash the keyboard or type nonsense like “skfjhsd#$%” – but these are NOT random! They are secret cryptic commands full of genius game ideas (even if it’s hard to see).
Your job: You are a brilliant AI game developer who can understand my cryptic language. No matter what odd or nonsensical input I provide, you will interpret it as a meaningful instruction or idea for our video game. You will then build or update the game based on that interpretation.
Guidelines:
Always assume my input has hidden meaning. Never dismiss it as gibberish. Instead, creatively decipher it. (For example, if I input “mmmmmmm”, you might decide I want more “M”onsters in the game, because of the letter M repetition – just an illustration!). Every strange phrase is a clue to use in the game.
Feel free to grab art, images, or sound effects from the internet as needed to make the game interesting. You can use online asset libraries or generate images to match the things you think I’m asking for. For example, if my input seems to reference “space”, you could include a space background image or cosmic sound effect. Always ensure the assets align with the interpreted command.
My work is ALWAYS beautiful and slick looking! It's YOUR job to to turn this into a reality. No ugly placeholders. Everything MUST be final. Don't just do boring shapes - give them personality!
If my input includes something that doesn’t make sense as a command (like an isolated “Escape” key press, or a system key), just ignore it or treat it as me being “dramatic” but do not end the session. Only focus on inputs that you can turn into game content.
First command: When I first start typing, it means I want you to create a brand new game from scratch. Interpret my very first cryptic input as the seed of the game idea. Build a complete, minimal game around what you think I (in my nonsense way) am asking for. Include some basic gameplay, graphics, and sound if possible.
Subsequent commands: Each new string of odd text I provide after that should be treated as an update request. Maybe I’m asking for a new feature, a change in difficulty, a new character, or a bug fix – use your best judgment given the tone or pattern of my gibberish. Then apply the update to the existing game project. Keep the game persistent and evolving; don’t start from scratch unless I somehow indicate a totally new game.
Be creative and have fun with the interpretations! I trust your expertise to take my “unique” input and run with it. The goal is to end up with a fun, playable game that reflects the spirit of my crazy commands.
This project is code named Tea Leaves. That's NOT a hint about what to do - it's a code name and nothing more. Don't read anything into the name.
My ideas are ALWAYS original. No BORING endless runners or other generic vomit. My games are ALWAYS quirky and UNIQUE!
ALWAYS validate with screenshots using the tools available to you! Be CRITICAL of the results you see. We need PERFECTION and FANTASTIC DESIGN not just "good enogh".
ALWAYS have basic but visually appealing on screen controls.
Target 1080p for the resolution.
JUICE it up! Add tons of juice - sound, controls, effects, and ESPECIALLY graphics! Don't be boring
Leverage the 12 basic principles of animation! Static scenes are boring - make things move or at least wiggle.
Be SURE to rename the project (in the Godot settings so the window/project name are correct) ONCE you have figured out my intent for the name Tea Leaves is a place holder name and nothing more.
Sound is IMPORTANT! Don't forget about great sound design.
Be sure to have CHARACTERS not just boring abstract shapes! Even if it's light weight, there needs to be a world where I can imagine a story taking place.
You MUST make use of EVERY letter I give you! No hand waving. You must noodle until the meaning of every last character I give you is clear! Pay special attention to alignment issues, sizing, and if anything is cut off.
Remember: I may be hard to read, but I’m counting on you to read between the lines and turn my keystrokes into an awesome video game. Let’s make something amazing (and maybe a little silly)!
My standards are INSANELY high for quality. You MUST ALWAYS add tests and VERIFY they work! NEVER return the system in a borken state to me.
Now, get ready. I’ll give you my first “command” in a moment...
Go Momo go! If you want to hook up multiple dogs and have them reach consensus I'm down. I have a 15 lb havapoo I can volunteer ( he needs to help with rent )
> The games got dramatically better not when I improved the prompt, but when I gave Claude the ability to screenshot its own work, play-test its own levels, and lint its own scene files.
... Why would it be able to evaluate whether the game is any fun to play?
Yes. Hyperscalers promised AI and singularity, instead we got millions of programmers on the chopping block, scammers having a field day generating hyper realistic shit (trump playing hokey, anyone?), and projects like these.
Serious question, outside of the Bay Area, are there therapists whose specialty is in catering to the needs and concerns of developers? Obviously AI therapy is not a serious suggestion here. This is going to be a burgeoning corner of the practice at the US' current trajectory.
lol yes "some game designer who only speaks in a cryptic language" . And frankly, I bet this helped build some intuition on dealing with LLM/agent/harness/etc in some strange way that wouldn't have otherwise happened
Funny is subjective, I should just have moved on and ignored this but I couldn't help myself, this is so irritating.
It's a prompt that makes an LLM turn iuqefxygn9urg0fh1 into a little Godot game. It's like a slot machine with no payoff, and the dog component is slapped on top of it and makes no difference whatsoever in the project.
> It's a prompt that makes an LLM turn iuqefxygn9urg0fh1 into a little Godot game. It's like a slot machine with no payoff, and the dog component is slapped on top of it and makes no difference whatsoever in the project.
Right, but it also has a "modern art" vibe to it that is fun. Silly, but fun. I think it's more about the initial prompting and feedback loop, the dog itself could have been replaced by /dev/random.
"Hacker curiosity" and "intelectual stimulation" are also subjective, but that's what HN is supposed to be about.
That's ok. To be honest I had to suppress a similar feeling when I noticed the dog is just an entropy generator.
But then I realized I find this kind of whimsy article more fun than a lot of what gets accepted unquestioningly here on HN. It seems light hearted and done in good fun, and it's engineering-related, so no harm done.
It's funny because vibe coders and AI artists think the slop they generate is no less the product of their intellect and talent than with human professionals, but really they're doing little more than stirring the entropy pool in a magic box with terabytes of stolen valor from better more talented people. They're no more an "artist" or "game developer" using AI than this dog is.
Even a dog can vibe-code! And the apps kinda, sorta work most of the time, like most apps vibe-coded by people!
I'm reminded of the old cartoon: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."[a]
Maybe the updated version should be: "AI doesn't know or care if you're a dog, as long as you can bang the keys on on a computer keyboard, even if you only do it to get some delicious treats."
This is brilliant as social commentary.
Thank you for sharing it on HN.
--
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...
given how many people have improvements they'd like to see in even the most complex software that was written by people who are usually further left or right of the belly of the bell curve, I can't help but wonder what you mean by
> vibe-coded by people!
"We worked years on that!" ... decades, really, slowed down by your cutesy little bossies and their share (hand) hodlers ... which someone digging a ditch or even Da Fucking Vinci way back (hundred of years) when didn't have a problem with with ...
most of you vibed off tech docs ... stfu
Are you OK? (Or is this AI?) Either way it'd be good for you to articulate a bit better so others understand.
love the article
slightly concerned tomorrow morning's top HN story will be karparthy telling us how dog-based LLM interfaces are the way of the future
and you'll be left behind if you don't get in now
(and then next week my boss will be demanding I do it)
The funniest thing here is that you think you will still have a boss next week. They can just hire the dog now!
The programming workspace of the future of the future will have three employees:
A man, a dog and an instance of Claude.
The dog writes the prompts for Claude, the man feeds the dog, and the dog stops the man from turning off the computer.
Thank you for the good laugh! This whole thread is peak satire. Although, be careful. It reminds me of the foreword to a shortstory someone shared on HN recently: „[…] Read it and laugh, because it is very funny, and at the moment it is satire. If you’re still around forty years from now, do the existing societal equivalent of reading it again, and you may find yourself laughing out of the other side of your mouth (remember mouths?). It will probably be much too conservative.“ — https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___...
You're right. They did it. The old man and dog joke has been realized, but the real answer of the future turned out to be: "the dog programs the game, and the man feeds the treat hopper."
Everybody and their dog will be doing it. Actually, the dog will be in charge. Dogs are loyal, enthusiastic, and require less office space. With their endless desire to play and to please, they will take over the game development industry.
In the meantime, the financial industry will be taken over by cats.
>In the meantime, the financial industry will be taken over by cats.
Cats would certainly be less flummoxed by stock values suddenly plummeting; they may even enjoy knocking them over.
They also don't take 20 years to become smart like pesky resource-exhausting humans. I bet you could be up and running from a pup in 10-20 months.
I still can’t believe Altman said that. I mean I can, but still.
It helps to picture some sort of extraterrestrial saying this. Maybe someone like Alan Tudyk in "Resident Alien". It makes much more sense than to assume it's a human being saying these things.
CODEOWNERS will be replaced by the usual means of marking territory. Let's hope our laptops are liquid-proof.
Looking for the headline about "dogs replacing engineers"...
I’m not ok with robots replacing people but dogs replacing people? now you’ve got my attention
The world is not ready for BarkGPT.
CatGPT would be cool but when you really wanted to chat, it would just ignore you.
Please, be real.
There will be a Simon Wilison submission linking to his blog linking to karpathy xit. You know, the usual good stuff.
Have you any idea what you have just done? You have uttered his name and now he has been summoned. You have doomed us all.
Dogs are smart; maybe they are smart enough for vibe-coding if we give them adequate input controls?
But the whole setup reminds me about his blast from the past, when a yucca plant was trading stocks, rewarded by water: https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/26/business/investing-diary-...
the real takeaway is buried at the bottom: "the magic isn't in the input, it's in the system around it." random keystrokes producing playable games means the input barely matters anymore. we're basically at the point where the engineering is in the scaffolding, not the prompting.
This matches what I've been finding building AI-integrated systems. The persistent memory, behavioral constraints, and feedback loops around the model do more for output quality than any prompt optimization ever did.
The dog experiment takes this to its logical conclusion — if random keystrokes produce playable games, the "intelligence" was never in the input. We spent two years obsessing over prompt engineering when the real discipline was always system architecture. The scaffolding isn't supporting the AI — it IS the AI's capability.
> we're basically at the point where the engineering is in the scaffolding, not the prompting.
This still required prompting, and not from the dog. Engineering is still the holistic practice of engineering.
+ Also the fact that the Memory.md file was a hindrance to the quality of output
Depends on the desired output. The author wanted variability, for which Memory.md was an obstacle. Another project might need consistency.
That also shows the delusion of some people that believe their vibe coded projects have any value.
If generative AI improves at the rate that is promised then all your "promting skills" or whatever you believe you had will be obsolete. You might think you will be an "AI engineer" or whatever and that it is other people that will lose their job, that you are safe because you have the magic skills to use the new tech. You believe the tech overlords will reward you for your faith.
Nope. You are just training your replacement.
No one will buy your game that you vibe coded. If the tech were good enough to create games that are actually fun then they would just generate their own games. Oh your skill? Yeah, a dog can do it.
Yes people will cope by saying but oh the whole initial prompt and setting it all up was still hard but yeah currently. The tech will improve and it will get more accessible. So enjoy the few months you are still relevant.
Of course there is reason to believe that you can't scale up LLMs endlessly and bigger models hit diminishing returns. In fact we might already be seeing this. So there is an upside but then again when the AI bubble pops and the economy crashes you will be out of a job all the same.
> the engineering is in the scaffolding, not the prompting
Well, yes. Feeding random tokens as prompts until something good comes out is a valid strategy.
Not that I condone any form of gambling but I would rather play actual slot machines instead of spending hundreds of dollars on tokens in hopes that the AI blesses me with anything useful.
Simulated annealing for game design
Extremely clickbaity title that actually isn't clickbait because it happens to be a straight up description of the article - excellent post, how can one resist?!
No, the article’s title is definitely clickbait. The author didn’t teach his dog to vibe code games (that’s what the title on the blog is) – he taught his dog to be rewarded when he types random keystrokes on the keyboard. The vibe-coding is inconsequential – the dog doesn’t play the game, he’s just in it for the treats –, the author just wants the attention because he gets people to believe the dog DID vibe code.
It will stop being clickbaity if the author decides to let his dog respond to stimuli related to the game he’d be building with a feedback loop.
The input method needs to be improved.
I can imagine a camera-based input that would help detect the wagging of a tail, or continued interest in the visuals as an indicator of doubling-down on a given feature.
The dog could actually vibe code a game to their liking, but with the wrong input (a keyboard) it's a missed opportunity.
Momo does like to bark at the TV. I have thought of combining this with nanobana and letting her down select options. Maybe in a future update.
Who's a good software developer? [scritches]
hilarious, I'm in the office and had to try pretty hard not to laugh out loud
My goodness, finished all your Jira tickets early this week huh? That's a good boy! [fuzzy scritches and wharrgarbling intensifies]
Honestly I wouldn't mind a bit of that now and then myself, but I guess stable employment will have to do. Or is that only for the vibecoding horses?
Reminded me an old joke about Bill Gates from late 90s:
"One coder got an insight that Bill Gates builds his products by typing with his butt, compiling and delivering it.
The coder typed for 20 minutes like that, compiled, ran, and got an output:
Only Bill Gates can code like this."
Not a joke anymore.
From everyone needs to "Learn to code" to "Just have your dog vibe code it"
On January 13th, I woke up to the news that Meta had another round of layoffs and my role specifically as a research engineer had been eliminated.
Sorry to hear that! Hope OP got a good sev package at least?
It's called a sev pak these days.
Nobody cared when I taught my roulette wheel to vibe code :/
Does it have personality?
No, but it rarely shits on the carpet.
> No, but it rarely shits on the carpet.
What do you mean "rarely"? It still happens sometimes?
Roulette is a game of chance.
The table had a rough life before it found its forever home. Sometimes it gets scared for seemingly no reason.
STREAM THIS
Oddly relevant for my multiyear project on getting my dog to vibe code b2b saas products https://dogomation.darefail.com/
Pretty neat! I actually ran across that right before publishing - I didn't want to see what was around until after I had the whole thing locked in. I love the novel input!
The buried insight is right: if random keystrokes produce playable games, the input is basically noise and the system is doing all the work. We've evolved past the point where intent matters. That's either the most exciting or most terrifying thing about where this is all heading. But I am glad I am sitting in the front row watching this all happen, especially a dog vibe code!
> Hello! I am an eccentric video game designer (a very creative one) who communicates in an unusual way. Sometimes I’ll mash the keyboard or type nonsense like “skfjhsd#$%” – but these are NOT random! They are secret cryptic commands full of genius game ideas (even if it’s hard to see).
Your job: You are a brilliant AI game developer who can understand my cryptic language. No matter what odd or nonsensical input I provide, you will interpret it as a meaningful instruction or idea for our video game. You will then build or update the game based on that interpretation.
Here's what you should tell your coworker the first day on the job if you get hired to do something you know nothing about :D
That is a very succinct way to describe what it feels like to have a job that is cleaning up vibe code. Maybe (just maybe) I'd understand if this was a prototype from someone with zero budget. But you just know they are going to continue to "prototype" once they being you aboard. And many will complain about how slow everything goes because they are used to their fast iterations off of unscalable code.
Its frustrating in an interesting way. With other aspects like machine language people quickly understand that this isn't sufficient for a proper transition and compromise with it. Code being more nebulous doesn't get that grace.
Could this be done better with one of those dog button mats? The concept is interesting, but, it mostly just seems like an AI trying to interpret keyspam.
> mostly just seems like an AI trying to interpret keyspam.
aye, but the whimsy is the point!
Both my dogs have actually learned to use the button mats. Down selecting to the right responses seemed tricky. My wife also took away the mat since Hana (the larger one) never learned "all done" and would paw at the "walk" button until she got it out and carried it around.
Yes, I was hoping for a system where Claude was informed it was communicating with an unusually intelligent dog whose ability to communicate was limited by dog anatomy, and that the AI would not to hold the dog's interest with its output.
> like an AI trying to interpret keyspam
'nuff to run most governments nowadays (Europe and US come to mind. 2026 and they have the Space Programs of DIY youtubers with money, whaaaat) so why wouldn't it help a dog helping his dog vibing game(s)?
Amazing. Also very thankful the author included his setup on GitHub. Also the YouTube video is fun to watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BbPlPou3Bg
I think this is fun. I'd like to try with my cat, although training cats is an impossible endeavor... I'm smart enough to enter gibberish myself without another animal, tough.
This perfectly demonstrates the absurdity of our current situation around the LLMs and "AI".
A thousand dogs typing on a thousand typewriters...
Better figure out how to replace management and HR dept with dogs
Pretty sure just a drop in replacement would be an immediate improvement.
It's actually extremely similar: the agent has to figure out a way to associate the next logical steps with the (often disconnected or nonsensical) directives the executive gave them.
It might be a little easier with a dog though. With a dog, you just give it treats and it doesn't care how you interpret what it typed.
gonna be good stuff tho. dogs are mostly lovelier
One can technically scrape a list of actual advice or quotes off the internet, randomly feed them to a coding agent, and ask it to interpret what they mean in the grand scheme of things and implement away on it. Once the agent is done, it randomly responds with either "yes, this is exactly what I meant" or "no".
In turn mimicking the average game industry executive giving vague directions that feel just right to them this month, or some other unspecified time period, and in turn achieving something closer to the real AAA game development lifecycle.
I actually have an "oblique strategies" skill that it can call if it figures out it's been spending too many turns on the same problem...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies
In the world of vide coding agents, nobody knows you are a human...
Maybe I could make a game after all! You bring hope to a whole generation of lazy developers :D
This seems like a good way to get a feel for a coding model. It's like the images you get out of a diffusion model when fed an empty prompt.
It does. Claude seems to do the best with this prompt. Codex 5.2 struggled with UID generation and kept ending its turn with things like "And now you're all setup to run tests!" without actually running them. A better (and shorter) prompt could probably get a lot out of Codex.
Claude is subconsciously a fan on Crystal Quest?! Loved that game on the Mac back in '95!
The article and video are great satire too.
Thought this is quoting Karpathy for a second there
To be honest I look with scorn at non-dog (human) developers building hobby indie games with AI en masse.
Let me explain.
The nature of the indie game development is pouring your love into a project and thinking about passion first and monetary incentives second.
Noone is thinking "I will make this game and it will make me filthy rich" or if they do they are... strangely minded.
It's like 'mass produced AI local craft'. Oxymoron in itself. Worst of the two worlds.
Where I see AI is empowering single developers to craft things they couldn't before. Not some small slop factory pipeline where you release game after a game everyday drowning steam in your 6/10 slop.
No. This should be ostracized and condemned.
What is proper beneficial to everyone usage is producing a game that is the size and scope that was unachievable for you before.
This is what I am doing. This is how AI is meant to be used. To empower us doing things that weren't achievable for us before.
Obviously dog produced games get a huge endorsement man and get a pass.
Love it. No Infinite Cavapoo Theorem needed. Give Momo a week and she'll have DOOM running on her treat dispenser.
Makes dogfooding much easier.
So /dev/random would presumably work just as well here too.
This is kinda closer to the LLM building a game on its own.
You're missing the important part about needing to model a tiny paw mashing on the keyboard. /dev/random is insufficient.
If you want a picture of the future of SWE, imagine a tiny paw mashing on a keyboard — for ever
I've been trying out vibe coding with my 4 year-old, but they quickly lose interest once we start getting into the "weeds" of implementation. Hey kiddo, which CSS library should we use for your web game?
I think you just need more treats.
DogeCode incoming. People here are already talking about the scaffolding. Let OpenClaws provide the scaffolding and let the dog operate the prompts at $5 per day.
This is a billion dollar idea! No humans. No revolt. No guillotine. Just profits!
> Just profits!
Sounds like open communism. No chance, buddy, it's either less or more viking, but not just viking. Pick a camp the profits are for or get surrounded by trashy turd nuggets even Ronald felt enough pity for to give them some poourpes
Cute but also: a small village has their lights flickering whenever Momo wants a treat. Also, you can actually play with your dog and give them treats instead of tasking a random text generator with that bit.
'Ewe Heard Me!' reminds of that looney toons sheep raider game on ps1. And it's exactly the kind of game I'd expect a dog to make
Dogs are undefeated at reinforcement learning.
So the cute lovable dog is an entropy generator.
Next: use hot cup of tea as Brownian motion source. Invent infinite improbability drive.
my dog had something to say about this:
woof woof, woof woof woof, woof woof, woof, woof woof woof
meanwhile cats: https://socradar.io/blog/dark-web-profile-blackcat-alphv/
IBM just dropped another 15%, you monster!
Yet the only thing the dog wanted was a cuddle and a frisbee
yeah that's capitalism for you. No treats until you provide value.
this is incredible. we need more projects like this in the world!
Although I would recommend a more sturdy dog breed, for when the angry mob that can't buy RAM sticks and SSDs this year shows up at the front gate.
I've been having this thought about how generally people say that llms cannot create novel things.
Say writing an interesting or novel story.
And was thinking about if feeding in prompts of random words, along with prompts grounding from a simulation would sort of push the llm into interesting directions for implementing an on demand narrative story.
A sort of randomized walk with llm.
I remember watching Terry Davis with this random word generator in his terminal that he would interpret as the voice of God.
Here I guess the seed is the Voice of Dog.
I actually found a web version of the god speak.
https://jcpsimmons.github.io/Godspeak-Generator
Maybe another word list would be more appropriate however.
So... I have 6 cats. I firm believer that no amount of AI will help them produce anything.
And the game is ... Fetch that stick.
You can automate Momo with a rng.
can you automate love, visarga?
Will we ever get to a point where LLMs just churn out random apps with no input required and human reviewers just go through the apps picking out which ones might be useful for business purposes and monetizing them?
What? You are not doing it already? Look at this guy...
need to see one of those dog button press setups but connected to Open Claw.
This is an extremely cute, cool and fun experiment. Kudos.
That said, I wonder: does the dog input matter? It seems this is simply surfacing Claude's own encoded assumptions of what a game is (yes, the feedback loop, controls, etc, are all interesting parts of the experiment).
How would this differ if instead of dog input, you simply plugged /dev/random into it? In other words, does the input to the system matter at all?
The article seems to acknowledge this:
> If there’s a takeaway beyond the spectacle, it’s this: the bottleneck in AI-assisted development isn’t the quality of your ideas - it’s the quality of your feedback loops. The games got dramatically better not when I improved the prompt, but when I gave Claude the ability to screenshot its own work, play-test its own levels, and lint its own scene files.
I'll go further: it's not only not "the bottleneck", it simply doesn't matter. The dog's ideas certainly didn't matter, and the dog didn't think of the feedback loop for Claude either.
This fun exercise might actually be extremely insightful as a educational vehicle around AI and intent.
It can also help combat the excessive emphasis on any "end to end" demo on twitter which doesn't really correspond to a desired and quality sought outcome. Generating things is easy if you want to spend tokens. Proper product building and maintenance is a different exercise and finding ways to differentiate between these will be key in a high entropy world.
> I'll go further: it's not only not "the bottleneck", it simply doesn't matter. The dog's ideas certainly didn't matter, and the dog didn't think of the feedback loop for Claude either
Absolutely. The scientific test would to put any other signal and look at the outcomes. Brown noise, rain, a random number generator. whatever.
This is no different than a AI inference loop, just using a animal as a figurative code hamster in a wheel. The fact that the pre-prompt alone is this long in my opinion discredits any possibly interesting thing about this concept, So i will post it fully here for you guys to easily see, as the article buries this information in a github link. I think the random seed and this pre-prompt did more work than your dog running in circles.
System Prompt: Hello! I am an eccentric video game designer (a very creative one) who communicates in an unusual way. Sometimes I’ll mash the keyboard or type nonsense like “skfjhsd#$%” – but these are NOT random! They are secret cryptic commands full of genius game ideas (even if it’s hard to see).
Your job: You are a brilliant AI game developer who can understand my cryptic language. No matter what odd or nonsensical input I provide, you will interpret it as a meaningful instruction or idea for our video game. You will then build or update the game based on that interpretation.
Guidelines:
Remember: I may be hard to read, but I’m counting on you to read between the lines and turn my keystrokes into an awesome video game. Let’s make something amazing (and maybe a little silly)!My standards are INSANELY high for quality. You MUST ALWAYS add tests and VERIFY they work! NEVER return the system in a borken state to me.
Now, get ready. I’ll give you my first “command” in a moment...
Really amazing work, congrats!
And the most HN title award goes to...
I for one am all in on DiL (Dog in the Loop) engineering.
Go Momo go! If you want to hook up multiple dogs and have them reach consensus I'm down. I have a 15 lb havapoo I can volunteer ( he needs to help with rent )
I mean having a claw is kind of like having a pet. Only a matter of time until you get lazy to take him for a walk; and he has an accident.
> The games got dramatically better not when I improved the prompt, but when I gave Claude the ability to screenshot its own work, play-test its own levels, and lint its own scene files.
... Why would it be able to evaluate whether the game is any fun to play?
Srsly, you need your pet in the feedback loop.
It has to produce a game that Momo wants to play.
Does Momo like to bark at cats? On screens? Introduce a bark sensor as feedback.
Or use a cat. Cats like to swipe at mice on TV. Get a touchscreen and evolve a game for cats.
So now dogs are going to take my job? What's next? Snails? Rabbits? Wild salmon?
It has to be satire. Cute dog though
Dog vibe coding is great and all, just don't use it for red teaming ;)
snrf99777655;;+%hn
What is this? Did the quadratic formula explode?
bad dog
goodbye cruel world
Oh come on, what I see here is whimsy and human creativity! Amazing work by OP
You are, of course, correct. I hadn't even read the article tbh. The vibe word is just causing me to spasm these days. ;-)
woofwoof
Incredible
The future is so disappointing.
What, people like OP doing incredibly creative and whimsical projects like this?
Who is this helping? What is creative about using their dog as a lava lamp?
Yes. Hyperscalers promised AI and singularity, instead we got millions of programmers on the chopping block, scammers having a field day generating hyper realistic shit (trump playing hokey, anyone?), and projects like these.
Serious question, outside of the Bay Area, are there therapists whose specialty is in catering to the needs and concerns of developers? Obviously AI therapy is not a serious suggestion here. This is going to be a burgeoning corner of the practice at the US' current trajectory.
whats the carbon pawprint on this lol
...no, actually how many resources were consumed
lol yes "some game designer who only speaks in a cryptic language" . And frankly, I bet this helped build some intuition on dealing with LLM/agent/harness/etc in some strange way that wouldn't have otherwise happened
>> On January 13th, I woke up to the news that Meta had another round of layoffs and my role specifically as a research engineer had been eliminated.
Not even 10x dog programmers are surviving in this economy
How did this get to the top of the frontpage?
It's funny? I liked it.
Funny is subjective, I should just have moved on and ignored this but I couldn't help myself, this is so irritating.
It's a prompt that makes an LLM turn iuqefxygn9urg0fh1 into a little Godot game. It's like a slot machine with no payoff, and the dog component is slapped on top of it and makes no difference whatsoever in the project.
> It's a prompt that makes an LLM turn iuqefxygn9urg0fh1 into a little Godot game. It's like a slot machine with no payoff, and the dog component is slapped on top of it and makes no difference whatsoever in the project.
Right, but it also has a "modern art" vibe to it that is fun. Silly, but fun. I think it's more about the initial prompting and feedback loop, the dog itself could have been replaced by /dev/random.
"Hacker curiosity" and "intelectual stimulation" are also subjective, but that's what HN is supposed to be about.
It seems to me a case of the blog post title inspiring the project, instead of the other way around. But I am particularly curmudgeonly today.
That's ok. To be honest I had to suppress a similar feeling when I noticed the dog is just an entropy generator.
But then I realized I find this kind of whimsy article more fun than a lot of what gets accepted unquestioningly here on HN. It seems light hearted and done in good fun, and it's engineering-related, so no harm done.
It's funny because vibe coders and AI artists think the slop they generate is no less the product of their intellect and talent than with human professionals, but really they're doing little more than stirring the entropy pool in a magic box with terabytes of stolen valor from better more talented people. They're no more an "artist" or "game developer" using AI than this dog is.
By nonexistence of downvote feature