Shepherd's Dog: A Game by the Most Dangerous AI Model

“ 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.

My 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!

I 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.

(Exaggerated:) Guy who would never pay 20€ to another dev for such a game, pays same amount for AI.

Applause to Anthropic: mission accomplished!

Curious 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/shepa...

There 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/akiraxtwo/status/2064780732082651402 https://x.com/kieradev/status/2064482704763085202 https://x.com/VincentLogic/status/2064699740936356065 https://x.com/XiaohuiAI666/status/2064994538591223911

So it created a trivial game that a teenager could’ve built as a part-time project while acquiring deep knowledge.

Looks 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!

The 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”.

If 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.

I sure do miss Fable. It just knew how to do things and do them well. Sad it’s now blocked.

Pretty great game, am having some fun

Enjoyed 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-f...

Brilliant marketing here in the title

When you say €20 worth of tokens is it fair direct API call price or subsidized claude code?

The "world's most dangerous AI" framing is funny here because the result is basically the least dystopian use case imaginable

> 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.

Playing 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.

"a game idea I've had for years"

Bruv, there are already countless games with this exact mechanic...

In which harness?

He should ask AI to tell him that #aaa text on #eee background is not acceptable.

BAA VRAM EWE

Forces 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.

Now next game - The Boy who cried wolf! Wolf!

That’s one tired sheepdog.

I didn't even have to play. Immediately after opening, some notification about rotating my phone is obscuring the instructions and I cannot read them.

As 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.