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andai | on: Show HN: Ante, a coding agent in a single binary that runs offline
They are a bit weird with game development at the moment.

They can one shot entire games, with relatively minor issues.

And obviously asking for small code snippets and integrating them yourself has been well supported for five years.

But in Agent mode... not so much. I was asking frontier models to make simple changes to my Pong game (you know like the one from 1972) and it constantly failed to make simple changes or would break something else in the process.

The main issue is that they can't see what they're doing. Actually one of the agents tried playing the pong game by screenshotting every frame, and it ran for about 20 minutes before I realized what it was doing, and told it to calm down.

It takes about 10 seconds to process an image, so it was running the game at 0.1 frames per second... 600x slower than realtime. The technology is not quite there yet.

If your game is something turn-based though, with discrete States and well-defined transitions between them, they can help out a lot more with that.

59nadir | parent | next
Just so everyone who reads this understands; despite the criticism in this comment, it's being incredibly charitable to LLMs in the context of making games. They're not particularly good at it and you wouldn't want most of the code they write in your game and especially not in the underpinnings of your game.

It's not true as a general rule that they could give you correct small code snippets five years ago; I had frontier models not even understanding enough of the OpenGL API to make separate framebuffers correctly. I asked this as a test and the resulting recommended code would of course compile, but leave someone who didn't already know the correct way to do it staring at a black screen and potentially spending the next hour debugging that.

If you think you're somehow going to make an actual game worthy of people's time with LLMs, you are almost certainly mistaken. Not only because it'll be a complete, unworkable mess with really bad fundamentals, but also because if you're vibecoding the actual technical part you probably also think game design is just about "having ideas" or something else that's really reductive and incorrect.

ricardobeat | parent | next
Depends a lot on what model you use. Claude Sonnet/Opus, Deepseek, Mimo, M3 are smart enough to figure out how to create debug views, add single-frame screenshot and testing harnesses.
swrrt | parent | next
Seems visulization is still too expensive and sluggish. I tried to build things like tetris and snake eater with fable5 and got-5.6 sol, 90% of build successful in one shot and remaining needs 1~2 rounds debug. The whole experience is much better than months earlier, where a snake eater takes me 3~4 manually compile/run and input the error message and abnormal manually again and again.

But I am curious about building a larger scale game with/without professional engines like Godot. I highly doubt the model/agent is intelligent enough to setup the entire development environment correctly, thus may be struggle to test and debug themselves. Maybe something like GUI-agent a future?

swrrt | parent | next
BTW, I also tried to make a entire LLM-driven bot to play boardgames like chess or mahjong, but it has the same latency issues since most of the online platforms have strict per-turn time limit like 15-30s, which is almost impossible for LLM/agent to react in time.
chrisjj | parent
Sounds like every other plagiarist.