Shepherd's Dog: A Game by the Most Dangerous AI Model(koenvangilst.nl) |
Shepherd's Dog: A Game by the Most Dangerous AI Model(koenvangilst.nl) |
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.
In case it all just comes from training data, "one shotting" a game would be more comparable to "git pull" and changing some assets than "generating code".
I'm not saying this is how it works, I'm trivializing LLMs with this statement, but when I see someone on linkedin excited about generating checkers and chess my first thought is "you could have done that with git pull for the past 20 years".
I have pointed out on here before that instances of truly unique human ideas not grounded in nature or previous ideas from others is almost nil, there are not many examples that someone can give me. All human ideas and work is derivative.
Elves? Humans with pointy ears. Werewolves? Humans mixed with wolves. Car tyre? Cart wheel...stone wheel/roller. Etc.
So it’s interesting to me that the creator here didn’t encounter the tens of physically published versions, or the hundreds of them shipped to digital app stores, or all the codebases on GitHub, in the course of making this. I’m sure they would have done naturally prior to GenAI. Is that good or bad? I don’t know! But it’s interesting to me.
Ah well, it’s still fun and it does appear to measure how good AI is in creating these kind of games.
Even with the perfect AI to write, one would need to iterate through many different ideas, play testing constantly, getting people to play test and analyze what they found fun and where they got stuck. And to get the best ideas you'll need to be playing lots of different kinds of games.
Like I remember in college I had something akin to the idea of “50 people 1 question.” I was starting to become interested in shooting my own documentaries and was particularly interested in man on the street style interviews. I pitched it to a friend who then told me about 50p1q, which baffled him because it was like the hot thing already a year or two prior haha.
Anyway that’s just something I think happens a lot. And now with genAI people don’t throw the idea around even, they quickly do a crappy version of the thing, present it, then find out it exists. Which isn’t terrible I guess but it’s one less filter for my better or for worse.
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!
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
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.
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...
Also this is a game has very simple mechanics I am sure you can generate as easily with Cursor or some other tools.
Or is there some other AI usage described in this article that is not supported by cursor?
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!
The title could have been just “Shepherd’s Dog: A game by Fable 5”.
https://vnglst.github.io/when-ai-fails/shepards-dog/claude-f...
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.
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.
fROnTEnD DeV Is DeAd
DeSiGN Is DeAD
Cool idea tho, could be a fun game if if the UX wasnt so hostile.
For interest, some shepherds run two dogs, each on a different whistle or voice command pitch.
OP is just pushing slop, the 80% part anyone gets for free. (well 20 bucks)
Bruv, there are already countless games with this exact mechanic...
Snark aside (and apologies), there's absolutely nothing wrong with the "no new ideas" take and nobody should think there is. Humans tend to work collectively, try as we might to do or appear otherwise, and often come to the same conclusions through reasoning and logic. No one-person truly invented the light bulb, etc, when really all inventive thought is branches of derivative thought as we build our collective knowledgebase. A better question would be how many novel ideas are the logical conclusion of branches of derivative thought and how many are tangential brought about by the injection of our irrationally.
Coding is not the sole problem solving skill. In fact, coding may be one of the easier skills much of the time. Deciding what to build, where to focus efforts, understanding a customer's needs, could all be just as if not more challenging than the coding part.
Define big I guess. They're non-trivial, mix of internal enterprise tools, a multiplatform app (android/ios/mac/windows/web currently headbutting its way through review), including a billing system for my small telecommunications business.
> I dont think this is good for your mental health or physicaly your brains health
I find the experience of doing it without writing the code to be intellectually pretty similar. I still solve a lot of problems, the LLM couldn't, for example, one shot the event sourcing model I built for synching data between devices. It took quite a few iterations and I had to define a lot of the architecture, but I did it at a level that wasn't "here is a class, here is a module, this module does XYZ", more at the "whitepaper" level or describing how specific bits of the app needed to work in order to solve some problem.
It's also very similar to managing other developers.
> Its like driving your car 3 blocks instead of walking, your physical health will suffer
It's more similar to having staff rather than doing everything yourself. The problem solving just shifts to a different area, and you get more done.
The simplest counterargument: since there are already tens of similar games out there, why didn't the previous authors, supposedly grass-fed genuine checkmark blood-through-their-veins humans didn't notice the other 9-8-7-6-5... games, and still released their own version? Maybe because it was still that they wanted the game out there? Maybe because originality really isn't that common? Maybe because each individual had their own idea and spin to it? Maybe because they wanted the game out as they made it?
Same for this author. How they made the game is irrelevant, and nitpicking the "originality" or anything else is silly. Something like this wasn't possible 3 years ago. Now it's possible. Deal with it, and stop trying to find ways to diminish it. It's a huge accomplishment any way you cut it.
I gave a simple counterargument to this. Since there are "countless" prior games, many of them released before genAI, your argument is pointless.
In close lockstep with @ai_fry_your_brain, who at least makes it clear right on the tin that they're not here to engage in any earnest capacity whatsoever. Always a mixed feeling between being appreciative of that, and finding it blatant.
Good thing it's AI ruining communities, a thought I have no doubt you also share in. If only people properly recognized the hard work of people like you in this.
https://venturebeat.com/technology/anthropic-says-it-hit-a-3...
To spell it out in case it is still non-obvious: knowing this allows iteration. It allows remixing. It allows you to inspect what has come before and what it did well and where it succeeded and where it fell short and thus what you could _add_. It is an enabler of creativity! Thus I think it is interesting that GenAI may make it harder to have this experience.