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Posted by cleak 5 hours ago

I'm helping my dog vibe code games(www.calebleak.com)
475 points | 144 comments
cs702 3 hours ago|
Even a dog can vibe-code! And the apps kinda, sorta work most of the time, like most apps vibe-coded by people!

I'm reminded of the old cartoon: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."[a]

Maybe the updated version should be: "AI doesn't know or care if you're a dog, as long as you can bang the keys on on a computer keyboard, even if you only do it to get some delicious treats."

This is brilliant as social commentary.

Thank you for sharing it on HN.

--

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...

funkyfiddler369 1 hour ago|
given how many people have improvements they'd like to see in even the most complex software that was written by people who are usually further left or right of the belly of the bell curve, I can't help but wonder what you mean by

> vibe-coded by people!

"We worked years on that!" ... decades, really, slowed down by your cutesy little bossies and their share (hand) hodlers ... which someone digging a ditch or even Da Fucking Vinci way back (hundred of years) when didn't have a problem with with ...

most of you vibed off tech docs ... stfu

SahAssar 5 minutes ago||
Are you OK? (Or is this AI?) Either way it'd be good for you to articulate a bit better so others understand.
blibble 3 hours ago||
love the article

slightly concerned tomorrow morning's top HN story will be karparthy telling us how dog-based LLM interfaces are the way of the future

and you'll be left behind if you don't get in now

(and then next week my boss will be demanding I do it)

AlphaAndOmega0 2 hours ago||
The programming workspace of the future of the future will have three employees:

A man, a dog and an instance of Claude.

The dog writes the prompts for Claude, the man feeds the dog, and the dog stops the man from turning off the computer.

justinnk 12 minutes ago|||
Thank you for the good laugh! This whole thread is peak satire. Although, be careful. It reminds me of the foreword to a shortstory someone shared on HN recently: „[…] Read it and laugh, because it is very funny, and at the moment it is satire. If you’re still around forty years from now, do the existing societal equivalent of reading it again, and you may find yourself laughing out of the other side of your mouth (remember mouths?). It will probably be much too conservative.“ — https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___...
CobrastanJorji 43 minutes ago|||
You're right. They did it. The old man and dog joke has been realized, but the real answer of the future turned out to be: "the dog programs the game, and the man feeds the treat hopper."
nine_k 3 hours ago|||
Everybody and their dog will be doing it. Actually, the dog will be in charge. Dogs are loyal, enthusiastic, and require less office space. With their endless desire to play and to please, they will take over the game development industry.

In the meantime, the financial industry will be taken over by cats.

jjk166 6 minutes ago|||
>In the meantime, the financial industry will be taken over by cats.

Cats would certainly be less flummoxed by stock values suddenly plummeting; they may even enjoy knocking them over.

krsw 2 hours ago|||
They also don't take 20 years to become smart like pesky resource-exhausting humans. I bet you could be up and running from a pup in 10-20 months.
Forgeties79 1 hour ago||
I still can’t believe Altman said that. I mean I can, but still.
the_af 1 hour ago||
It helps to picture some sort of extraterrestrial saying this. Maybe someone like Alan Tudyk in "Resident Alien". It makes much more sense than to assume it's a human being saying these things.
i7l 2 hours ago|||
CODEOWNERS will be replaced by the usual means of marking territory. Let's hope our laptops are liquid-proof.
hrpnk 2 hours ago|||
Looking for the headline about "dogs replacing engineers"...
luxuryballs 1 hour ago||
I’m not ok with robots replacing people but dogs replacing people? now you’ve got my attention
dadrock 2 hours ago|||
The world is not ready for BarkGPT.
DrewADesign 2 hours ago||
CatGPT would be cool but when you really wanted to chat, it would just ignore you.
heliumtera 3 hours ago||
Please, be real.

There will be a Simon Wilison submission linking to his blog linking to karpathy xit. You know, the usual good stuff.

xantronix 2 hours ago||
Have you any idea what you have just done? You have uttered his name and now he has been summoned. You have doomed us all.
dingnuts 2 hours ago||
[dead]
nine_k 4 hours ago||
Dogs are smart; maybe they are smart enough for vibe-coding if we give them adequate input controls?

But the whole setup reminds me about his blast from the past, when a yucca plant was trading stocks, rewarded by water: https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/26/business/investing-diary-...

with 4 hours ago||
the real takeaway is buried at the bottom: "the magic isn't in the input, it's in the system around it." random keystrokes producing playable games means the input barely matters anymore. we're basically at the point where the engineering is in the scaffolding, not the prompting.
nemooperans 53 minutes ago||
This matches what I've been finding building AI-integrated systems. The persistent memory, behavioral constraints, and feedback loops around the model do more for output quality than any prompt optimization ever did.

The dog experiment takes this to its logical conclusion — if random keystrokes produce playable games, the "intelligence" was never in the input. We spent two years obsessing over prompt engineering when the real discipline was always system architecture. The scaffolding isn't supporting the AI — it IS the AI's capability.

avaer 2 hours ago|||
> we're basically at the point where the engineering is in the scaffolding, not the prompting.

This still required prompting, and not from the dog. Engineering is still the holistic practice of engineering.

ajspig1 3 hours ago|||
+ Also the fact that the Memory.md file was a hindrance to the quality of output
cezart 1 hour ago||
Depends on the desired output. The author wanted variability, for which Memory.md was an obstacle. Another project might need consistency.
cardanome 1 hour ago|||
That also shows the delusion of some people that believe their vibe coded projects have any value.

If generative AI improves at the rate that is promised then all your "promting skills" or whatever you believe you had will be obsolete. You might think you will be an "AI engineer" or whatever and that it is other people that will lose their job, that you are safe because you have the magic skills to use the new tech. You believe the tech overlords will reward you for your faith.

Nope. You are just training your replacement.

No one will buy your game that you vibe coded. If the tech were good enough to create games that are actually fun then they would just generate their own games. Oh your skill? Yeah, a dog can do it.

Yes people will cope by saying but oh the whole initial prompt and setting it all up was still hard but yeah currently. The tech will improve and it will get more accessible. So enjoy the few months you are still relevant.

Of course there is reason to believe that you can't scale up LLMs endlessly and bigger models hit diminishing returns. In fact we might already be seeing this. So there is an upside but then again when the AI bubble pops and the economy crashes you will be out of a job all the same.

otabdeveloper4 3 hours ago||
> the engineering is in the scaffolding, not the prompting

Well, yes. Feeding random tokens as prompts until something good comes out is a valid strategy.

cardanome 1 hour ago|||
Not that I condone any form of gambling but I would rather play actual slot machines instead of spending hundreds of dollars on tokens in hopes that the AI blesses me with anything useful.
yoyohello13 2 hours ago|||
Simulated annealing for game design
fallinditch 2 hours ago||
Extremely clickbaity title that actually isn't clickbait because it happens to be a straight up description of the article - excellent post, how can one resist?!
Diti 5 minutes ago|
No, the article’s title is definitely clickbait. The author didn’t teach his dog to vibe code games (that’s what the title on the blog is) – he taught his dog to be rewarded when he types random keystrokes on the keyboard. The vibe-coding is inconsequential – the dog doesn’t play the game, he’s just in it for the treats –, the author just wants the attention because he gets people to believe the dog DID vibe code.

It will stop being clickbaity if the author decides to let his dog respond to stimuli related to the game he’d be building with a feedback loop.

kidsil 2 hours ago||
The input method needs to be improved.

I can imagine a camera-based input that would help detect the wagging of a tail, or continued interest in the visuals as an indicator of doubling-down on a given feature.

The dog could actually vibe code a game to their liking, but with the wrong input (a keyboard) it's a missed opportunity.

cleak 2 hours ago|
Momo does like to bark at the TV. I have thought of combining this with nanobana and letting her down select options. Maybe in a future update.
pixelpoet 3 hours ago||
Who's a good software developer? [scritches]
dustycyanide 3 hours ago|
hilarious, I'm in the office and had to try pretty hard not to laugh out loud
pixelpoet 1 hour ago||
My goodness, finished all your Jira tickets early this week huh? That's a good boy! [fuzzy scritches and wharrgarbling intensifies]

Honestly I wouldn't mind a bit of that now and then myself, but I guess stable employment will have to do. Or is that only for the vibecoding horses?

oxag3n 4 hours ago||
Reminded me an old joke about Bill Gates from late 90s:

"One coder got an insight that Bill Gates builds his products by typing with his butt, compiling and delivering it.

The coder typed for 20 minutes like that, compiled, ran, and got an output:

Only Bill Gates can code like this."

Not a joke anymore.

InMice 4 hours ago||
From everyone needs to "Learn to code" to "Just have your dog vibe code it"
sciencejerk 1 hour ago|
On January 13th, I woke up to the news that Meta had another round of layoffs and my role specifically as a research engineer had been eliminated.

Sorry to hear that! Hope OP got a good sev package at least?

yesitcan 1 hour ago|
It's called a sev pak these days.
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