I tried vibe coding games with AI — neither were much fun

Small robot in front of code in background

(Image credit: Patrick Daxenbichler)

I love programming. But that's not to say I'm very good at it. If Stack Overflow vanished overnight, I'd probably find myself at a bit of a dead end with my go-to hobby. I've never taken a class or course, but thanks to the unlimited knowledge pool that is the internet, and a fair amount of helpful Indian YouTubers, I've stitched together a patchwork quilt of knowhow that's helped me makeshift my way through many a game prototype.

Whether it's reverse-engineering game mechanics or chasing a new (to me at least) concept I'll inevitably abandon before finishing, coding is a stimulating, curious, and satisfying pastime.

As AI models exploded onto the scene, many turned to them for coding solutions and debugging help, but I didn't. Not because I disagree with it, I've copied and pasted my own fair share of code I don't personally "get" from threads I've found online, I just want that sweet, sweet dopamine hit when I finally wedge that square peg into a round hole.

but maybe my mindset is a little outdated. AI models can now turn whimsical ideas into fully fledged projects in minutes, allowing rapid prototyping, if not fully-fledged outcomes, with minimal input. That's vibe coding — a term coined by Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and currently heading AI education with Eureka Labs.

Depending on who you ask, vibe coding is either the headache-free future of programming or a very nasty future headache for programmers. But after seeing several impressive vibe coding results online, my curiosity got the best of me. Can you really partner with AI to code on vibes alone? I wanted to find out.

There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper…February 2, 2025

Coding with the AI-lien: Prototypes powered by vibes

There are a great many tools to pick from, but I settled upon Claude 3.7 Sonnet for its speed and code preview windows, cutting back on any effort I'd need to make to see results.

That's the whole appeal of vibe coding: minimal effort, and maximum results. Don't worry about getting your hands dirty, this is Master Chef for machine code, where you set the challenge and judge the results. Whatever else happens along the way? You'll just have to vibe with.

I fed Claude several single-prompt game ideas to meddle with, and in under a minute — it produced instantly playable results in a preview window to the right of the chat.

Animation captured from a game prototype made with Claude 3.7 Sonnet through vibe coding. The capture shows player controlled green circles following the mouse cursor to attack enemy red circles. — (Image credit: Rael Hornby)

More complex requests might stray a little from my initial vision, but the foundations were being replicated, fully-rendered results like magic. It was impressive, If not a little intoxicating. What started as a simple strategy game with mouse-controlled units quickly evolved. Before I knew it, Claude had refined the gameplay to involve hit points, damage modifiers, blood splatters when units died, and even created a way to reinforce units and have them enter formations.

I got swept up in this, calling the shots with vague ideas thrown from my perch in the peanut gallery. How about more unit types, Claude? How about bases you can attack that stop enemies from spawning? I lost a few hours before realizing it, but I'd become the feature creep monster of every coder's nightmare. Though, of course, Claude was all too happy to oblige.

Was I happy with the results? Sure, but the ease of them only led me to want more. Not because I thought it was cool, but just so it would feel like I was still somehow influencing or participating in what Claude was achieving on my behalf.

Backseat coding: Not the driving force some people suggest

That's where vibe coding suddenly started to lose its appeal. The AI kept iterating, improving, and taking my advice, but I wasn't solving problems, only managing them.

Being a backseat driver alienates you from the outcome. If I wanted to get my hands dirty, I had to become familiar with code I didn't write. Even if Claude did write some well-documented scripts, I lacked the wider context of how different parts influenced each other. It felt less like a collaboration, and more like marking someone else's computer science homework.

And that's on the rare occasion there were any errors at all. Most of the time, everything just worked. Which sounds ideal — until you realize problem-solving is half the fun.

Vibe coding feels like skipping to the end of a book without considering the journey between the covers. The outcome is there, but the satisfaction of diving in over your head and having to hold your breath long enough to understand what's so fundamentally broken about line 106 of your code before coming up for air, isn't.

I felt no connection to the end result and gained nothing from its manifestation. I just didn't like it.

Killing the vibe (coding)

Is vibe coding the future? Probably.

Lowering the barrier to entry by this much might mean that one day we'll all eventually do away with commercial software and rely on our own AI-built, tailor-made tools for everyday tasks.

But that doesn't mean it's a good thing.

America outsourced manufacturing under the promise of efficiency and cost-cutting only to realize too late that had also exported the ability to build, maintain, and repair. Now, it's something the country scrambles to revive.

If we automate our way out of the equation with programming, we risk making the same mistake. Replacing what constitutes as a developer is a person who knows how to describe software but not make it or fix it when it breaks.

Vibe coding is great for getting your ideas off the ground, but bringing them ideas to life still requires getting your hands dirty.

Otherwise, you're just watching an LLM mangle it into something of its own while having a Claude take-the-wheel moment — yelling from the bleachers and wasting your creative potential, living vicariously through a robot. And that's just lame.

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Rael Hornby, potentially influenced by far too many LucasArts titles at an early age, once thought he’d grow up to be a mighty pirate. However, after several interventions with close friends and family members, you’re now much more likely to see his name attached to the bylines of tech articles. While not maintaining a double life as an aspiring writer by day and indie game dev by night, you’ll find him sat in a corner somewhere muttering to himself about microtransactions or hunting down promising indie games on Twitter.