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