[HN Gopher] We put Claude Code in Rollercoaster Tycoon
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We put Claude Code in Rollercoaster Tycoon
Author : iamwil
Score : 319 points
Date : 2026-01-12 14:28 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (labs.ramp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (labs.ramp.com)
| nacozarina wrote:
| next up: Crusader Kings III
| mcphage wrote:
| > You're right, I did accidentally slaughter all the residents
| of Beziers. I won't do that again. But I think that you'll find
| God knows his own.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Paradox future hire right here
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| Crusader Kings is a franchise I really could see LLMs shine.
| One of the current main criticisms on the game is that there's
| a lack of events, and that they often don't really feel
| relevant to your character.
|
| An LLM could potentially make events far more aimed at your
| character, and could actually respond to things happening in
| the world far more than what the game currently does. It could
| really create some cool emerging gameplay.
| Braini wrote:
| In general you are right, I expect something like this to
| appear in the future and it would be cool.
|
| But isn't the criticism rather that there are too many (as
| you say repetitive, not relevant) events - its not like there
| are cool stories emerging from the underlying game mechanics
| anymore ("grand strategy") but players have to click through
| these boring predetermined events again and again.
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| You get too many events, but there aren't actually that
| many different events written, so you repeat the same ones
| over and over again. Eventually it just turns into the
| player clicking on the 'optimal' choice without actually
| reading the event.
| programd wrote:
| You could mod the game with more varied events, which
| were of course AI generated to begin with. Bit of an
| inception scenario where AI plays an AI modded game.
|
| The other option is to have an AI play another AI which
| is working as an antagonist, trying to make the player
| fail. More global plagues! More scheming underlings! More
| questionable choices for relaxation! Bit of an arms race
| there.
|
| Honestly I prefer Crusader Kings II if for no other
| reason that the UI is just so brilliantly insanely obtuse
| while also being very good looking.
| khoury wrote:
| Can't wait for someone to let Claude control a runescape
| character from scratch
| reactordev wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1qeh3nc/i_added_...
|
| https://ubos.tech/mcp/runescape-mcp-server-rs-osrs/
| ASpring wrote:
| People have been botting on Runescape since the early 2000s.
| Obviously not quite at the Claude level :). The botting forums
| were a group of very active and welcoming communities. This is
| actually what led me to Java programming and computer science
| more broadly--I wrote custom scripts for my characters.
|
| I still have some parts of the old Rei-net forum archived on an
| external somewhere.
| ideashower wrote:
| Wouldn't that break Jagex's TOS though? Is there a way of
| getting caught?
| AstroBen wrote:
| I imagine Jagex must be up there with having the most
| sophisticated bot detection out of anyone. Its been a thing
| for decades
| dpc050505 wrote:
| They detect bots but let a ton of them run free because any
| character having membership = revenue and an extremely
| significant chunk of active characters are bots. They nuked
| them all in 2011 I think and the game was nearly empty.
|
| SirPugger's youtube channel has loads of videos monitoring
| various bot farms.
| itsgrimetime wrote:
| I've done this! Given the right interface I was surprised at
| how well it did. Prompted it "You're controlling a character in
| Old School RuneScape, come up with a goal for yourself, and
| don't stop working on it until you've achieved it". It decided
| to fish for and cook 100 lobsters, and it did it pretty much
| flawlessly!
|
| Biggest downside was it's inability to see (literally), getting
| lists of interact-able game objects, NPCs, etc was fine when it
| decided to do something that didn't require any real-time
| input. Sailing, or anything that required it to react to what's
| on screen was pretty much impossible without more tooling to
| manage the reacting part for it (e.g. tool to navigate
| automatically to some location).
| HelloUsername wrote:
| *OpenRCT2
| skybrian wrote:
| Would a way to take screenshots help? It seems to work for
| browser testing.
| joshribakoff wrote:
| I've been doing game development and it starts to hallucinate
| more rapidly when it doesn't understand things like the
| direction it placing things or which way the camera is oriented
|
| Gemini models are a little bit better about spatial reasoning,
| but we're still not there yet because these models were not
| designed to do spatial reasoning they were designed to process
| text
|
| In my development, I also use the ascii matrix technique.
| miohtama wrote:
| They would need a spatial reason or layout specific tool, to
| translate to English and back
| falcor84 wrote:
| I wonder if they could integrate a secondary "world model"
| trained/fine-tuned on Rollercoaster Tycoon to just do the
| layout reasoning, and have the main agent offload tasks to
| it.
| kleene_op wrote:
| Spatial awareness was also a huge limitation to Claude
| playing pokemon.
|
| It really seems to me that the first AI company getting to
| implement "spatial awareness" vector tokens and integrating
| them neatly with the other conventional text, image and sound
| tokens will be reaping huge rewards. Some are already
| partnering with robot companies, it's only a matter of time
| before one of those gets there.
| nszceta wrote:
| This is also my experience with attempting to use Claude
| and GLM-4.7 with OpenSCAD. Horrible spatial reasoning
| abilities.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| I disagree. With opus I'll screenshot an app and draw all
| over it like a child with me paint and paste it into the chat
| - it seems to reasonably understand what I'm asking with my
| chicken scratch and dimensions.
|
| As far as 3d I don't have experience however it could be
| quite awful at that
| lukebechtel wrote:
| > We don't know any C++ at all, and we vibe-coded the entire
| project over a few weeks. The core pieces of the build are...
|
| what a world!
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I would've walked for days to a CompUSA and spent my life
| savings if there was anything remotely equivalent to this when
| I was learning C on my Macintosh 4400 in 1997
|
| People don't appreciate what they have
| lifetimerubyist wrote:
| It's worse. They're proud they don't know.
| risyachka wrote:
| Its like ordering a project from upwork- someone did it for
| you, you have no idea what is going on, kinda works though.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| Great analogy. "I don't know any C++ but I hired some
| people on Upwork and they delivered this software demo."
| whateveracct wrote:
| Con fuckign gratys, u can buy compute
| kmijyiyxfbklao wrote:
| Since there are no humans involved, it's more like
| growing a tree. Sure it's good to know how trees grow,
| but not knowing about cells didn't stop thousands of
| years of agriculture.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Very interesting analogy
| amlib wrote:
| Except that the tree is so malformed and the core
| structure so unsound that it can't grow much past its
| germination and dies of malnourishment because since you
| have zero understanding of biology, forestry and related
| fields there is no knowledge to save it or help it grow
| healthy.
|
| Also out of nowhere an invasive species of spiders that
| was inside the seed starts replicating geometrically and
| within seconds wraps the whole forest with webs and asks
| for a ransom in order to produce the secret enzyme that
| can dissolve it. Trying to torch it will set the whole
| forest on fire, brute force is futile. Unfortunately, you
| assumed the process would only plagiarize the good bits,
| but seems like it also sometimes plagiarizes the bad bits
| too, oops.
| Jaysobel wrote:
| The Gas Town piece reminded me of this as well. The
| author there leaned into role playing, social and culture
| analogies, and it made a lot more sense than an
| architecture diagram in which one node is "black box
| intelligence" with a single line leading out of it...
| risyachka wrote:
| Its not like tree at all because tree is one and done.
|
| Code is a project that has to be updated, fixed, etc.
|
| So when something breaks - you have to ask the contractor
| again. It may not find an issue, or mess things up when
| it tries to fix it making project useless, etc.
|
| Its more like a car. Every time something goes wrong you
| will pay for it - sometimes it will get back in even
| worse shape (no refunds though), sometimes it will cost
| you x100 because there is nothing you can do, you need it
| and you can't manage it on your own.
| eks391 wrote:
| Trees are not static, unchanging, pop into existence and
| forget about, things. Trees that don't get regular
| "updates" of adequate sunlight, water, and nutrients die.
| In fact, too much light or water could kill it. Or soil
| that is not the right courseness or acidity level could
| hamper or prevent growth. Now add "bugs". Literal bugs,
| diseases, and even competing plants that could eat,
| poison, or choke the tree. You might be thinking of trees
| that are indigenous to an area. Even these compete for
| the resources and plagues of their area, but are more apt
| than the trees accustom to different environments, and
| even they go through the cycle of life. I think his
| analogy was perfect, because this is the first time
| coding could resemble nature. We are just used to the
| carefully curated human made code, as there has not been
| such a thing as naturally occuring, no human interaction,
| code before
| kshri24 wrote:
| I wouldn't say it is a tree as such as at least trees are
| deterministic where input parameters (seed, environment,
| sunlight) define the output.
|
| LLM outputs are akin to a mutant tree that can decide to
| randomly sprout a giant mushroom instead of a branch. And
| you won't have any idea why despite your input parameters
| being deterministic.
| doug_durham wrote:
| In what world are trees deterministic? There are a set of
| parameters that you can control that give you a higher
| probability of success, but uncontrollable variables can
| wipe you out.
| dpc050505 wrote:
| You haven't done a lot of gardening if you don't know
| plants get 'randomly' (there's a biological explanation,
| but with the massive amounts of variables it feels
| random) attacked by parasites all the time. Go look at
| pot growing subreddits, they spend an enormous chunk of
| their time fighting mites.
| doug_durham wrote:
| "They" are? I didn't see that in the article. It sounds
| like you are projecting your prejudices on to a non-defined
| out group.
| imiric wrote:
| Did you actually learn C? Be thankful nothing like this
| existed in 1997.
|
| A machine generating code you don't understand is not the way
| to learn a programming language. It's a way to create
| software without programming.
|
| These tools _can_ be used as learning assistants, but the
| vast majority of people don 't use them as such. This will
| lead to a collective degradation of knowledge and skills, and
| the proliferation of shoddily built software with more issues
| than anyone relying on these tools will know how to fix. At
| least people who can actually program will be in demand to
| fix this mess for years to come.
| metaltyphoon wrote:
| I don't understand how OP thinks that being oblivious how
| anything work underneath is a good thing. There is a
| threshold of abstraction to which you must know how it
| works to effectively fix it when it breaks.
| jedberg wrote:
| You can be a super productive Python coder without any
| clue how assembly works. Vibe coding is just one more
| level of abstraction.
|
| Just like how we still need assembly and C programmers
| for the most critical use cases, we'll still need Python
| and Golang programmers for things that need to be more
| efficient than what was vibe coded.
|
| But do you really need your $whatever to be super
| efficient, or is it good enough if it just works?
| kshri24 wrote:
| One is deterministic the other is not. I leave it to you
| to determine which is which in this scenario.
| afro88 wrote:
| Humans writing code are also non deterministic. When you
| vibe code you're basically a product owner / manager.
| Vibe coding isn't a higher level programming language,
| it's an abstraction over a software engineer /
| engineering team.
| pqtyw wrote:
| Perhaps there is no need to actually understand assembly,
| but if you don't understand certain basic concepts
| actually deploying any software you wrote to production
| would be a lottery with some rather poor prizes.
| Regardless of how "productive" you were.
| ben_w wrote:
| _Somebody_ needs to understand, to the standard of "well
| enough".
|
| The investors who paid for the CEO who hired your project
| manager to hire you to figure that out, didn't.
|
| I think in this analogy, vibe coders are project
| managers, who may indeed still benefit from understanding
| computers, but when they don't the odds aren't anywhere
| near as poor as a lottery. Ignorance still blows up in
| people's faces. I'd say the analogy here with humans
| would be a stereotypical PHB who can't tell what support
| the dev needs to do their job and then puts them on a PIP
| the moment any unclear requirement blows up in anyone's
| face.
| neilwilson wrote:
| That's what a C compiler does when generating a binary.
|
| There was a time when you had to know 'as', 'ld' and maybe
| even 'ar' to get an executable.
|
| In the early days of g++, there was no guarantee the object
| code worked as intended. But it was fun working that out
| and filing the bug reports.
|
| This new tool is just a different sort of transpiler and
| optimiser.
|
| Treat it as such.
| imiric wrote:
| If you don't see a difference between a compiler and a
| probabilistic token generator, I don't know what to tell
| you.
|
| And, yes, I'm aware that most compilers are not entirely
| deterministic either, but LLMs are inherently
| nondeterministic. And I'm also aware that you can tweak
| LLMs to be more deterministic, but in practice they're
| never deployed like that.
|
| Besides, creating software via natural language is an
| entirely different exercise than using a structured
| language purposely built for that.
|
| We're talking about two entirely different ways of
| creating software, and any comparison between them is
| completely absurd.
| anthk wrote:
| People negating down your comment are just "engineers"
| doomed to fail sooner or later.
|
| Meanwhile, 9front users have read at least the plan9
| intro and know about nm, 1-9c, 1-9l and the like. Wibe
| coders will be put on their place sooner or later. It's
| just a matter of time.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _There was a time when you had to know 'as', 'ld' and
| maybe even 'ar' to get an executable._
|
| No, there wasn't: you could just run the shell script, or
| (a bit later) the makefile. But there were _benefits_ to
| knowing as, ld and ar, and there still are today.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > But there were benefits to knowing as, ld and ar, and
| there still are today.
|
| This is trivially true. The constraint for anything you
| do in your life is time it takes to know something.
|
| So the far more interesting question is: At what level do
| you want to solve problems - and is it likely that you
| need knowledge of as, ld and ar over anything else, that
| you could learn instead?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Knowledge of as, ld, ar, cc, etc is only needed when
| setting up (or modifying) your build toolchain, and in
| practice you can just copy-paste the build script from
| some other, similar project. Knowledge of these tools has
| _never_ been needed.
| anthk wrote:
| Competent C programmers know about nm, as, ld and a bunch
| of other binary sections in order to understand issues
| and proper debugging.
|
| Everyone else are deluding themselves. Even the 9front
| intro requieres you to at least know the basics of nm and
| friends.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| It's just another layer.
|
| Assembly programmers from years gone by would likley be
| equally dismissive of the self-aggrandizing code block
| stitchers of today.
|
| (on topic, RCT was coded entirely in assembly, quite the
| achievement)
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| It would've been nice to have a system that I could just
| ask questions to teach me how it works instead of having to
| pour through the few books that existed on C that was
| actually accessible to a teenager learning on their own
|
| Going to arcane websites, forum full of neckbeards to
| expect you to already understand everything isn't exactly a
| great way to learn
|
| The early Internet was unbelievably hostile to people
| trying to learn genuinely
| rabf wrote:
| I had the books (from the library) but never managed to
| get a compiler for many years! Was quite confusing trying
| to understand all the unix references when my only
| experience with a computer was the Atari ST.
| hrldcpr wrote:
| *pore through
|
| (not a judgment, just mentioning in case the distinction
| is interesting to anyone)
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Everyone should read that section. It was really interesting
| reading about their experiences/challenges getting it all
| working.
| falloutx wrote:
| First time I am seeing realistic timelines from a vibe-coded
| project. Usually everyone who vibe codes just says they did in
| few hours, no matter the project.
| ben_w wrote:
| Hmm. My experience with it is that a few hours of that will
| get you a sprint if you're lucky and the prompt hits the
| happy path. I had... I think two of those, over 5 weeks? I
| can believe plenty of random people stumble across happy-path
| examples.
|
| Exciting when it works, but I think a much more exciting
| result for people with less experience who may not know that
| the "works for me" demo is the dreaded "first 90%", and even
| fairly small projects aren't done until the fifth-to-tenth
| 90%.
|
| (That, and that vibe coding in the sense of "no code review"
| are prone to balls of mud, so you need to be above average at
| project management to avoid that after a few sprint-
| equivalents of output).
| Aurornis wrote:
| It's possible to vibe code certain generic things in a few
| hours if you're basically combining common, thoroughly
| documented, mature building blocks. It's not going to be
| production ready or polished but you can get surprisingly far
| with some things.
|
| For real work, that phase is like starting from a template or
| a boilerplate repo. The real work begins after the basics are
| wired together.
| mentos wrote:
| The opening paragraph I thought was the agent prompt haha
|
| > The park rating is climbing. Your flagship coaster is printing
| money. Guests are happy, for now. But you know what's coming: the
| inevitable cascade of breakdowns, the trash piling up by the
| exits, the queue times spiraling out of control.
| azhenley wrote:
| Edit: HN's auto-resubmit in action, ignore.
| Bluescreenbuddy wrote:
| What
| eterm wrote:
| So, this link is actually 5 days old, if you hover the "2
| hours ago" you'll see the date 5 days ago.
|
| HN second-chance pool shenanigans.
| alt227 wrote:
| Can you point to any documentation which explains how this
| works?
|
| Genuinely interested.
| azhenley wrote:
| Dang gave some explanation here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
| hk__2 wrote:
| > The only other notable setback was an accidental use of the
| word "revert" which Codex took literally, and ran git revert on a
| file where 1-2 hours of progress had been accumulating.
| Filligree wrote:
| Yet another reason to use Jujutsu. And put a `jj status`
| wrapper in your PS1. ;-)
| diath wrote:
| > Yet another reason to use Jujutsu
|
| And what would that reason be? You can git revert a git
| revert.
| mbb70 wrote:
| Probably it actually ran git checkout or reset. As you say
| git revert only operates on committed snapshots so it will
| all be in the reflog
| ewoodrich wrote:
| Yes, this exact scenario has happened to me a couple
| times with both Claude and Codex, and it's usually git
| checkout, more rarely git reset. They immediately realize
| they fucked up and spend a few minutes trying to undo by
| throwing random git commands at it until eventually
| giving up.
| foobar10000 wrote:
| Yeap - this is why when running it in a dev container, I
| just use ZFS and set up a 1 minute auto-snapshot - which
| is set up as root - so it generally cannot blow it away.
| And cc/codex/gemini know how to deal with zfs snapshots
| to revert from them.
|
| Of course if you give an agentic loop root access in yolo
| mode - then I am not sure how to help...
| jsnell wrote:
| You're correct for an actual git revert, but it seems
| pretty clear that the original authors have mangled the
| story and it was actually either a "git checkout" or "git
| reset". The "file where 1-2 hours of progress had been
| accumulating" phrasing only makes sense if those were
| uncommitted changes.
|
| And the reason jj helps in that case is that for jj there
| is no such thing as an uncommitted change.
| block_dagger wrote:
| Having no such thing as an uncommitted change seems like
| it would be a nightmare, but perhaps I'm just too git-
| oriented.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Things like the index become a workflow pattern, rather
| than a feature, if that makes any sense.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| Also JJ undo is there and easy to tell the model to use,
| I have it in my Claude.md
| hu3 wrote:
| surely Claude is much better at using git because of the
| massive training data difference.
|
| If it didn't undo git, it would do it with JJ either.
| westurner wrote:
| Start with env args like AGENT_ID for indicating which Merkle
| hash of which model(s) generated which code with which
| agent(s) and add those attributes to signed (-S) commit
| messages. For traceability; to find other faulty code
| generated by the same model and determine whether an agent or
| a human introduced the fault.
|
| Then, `git notes` is better for signature metadata because it
| doesn't change the commit hash to add signatures for the
| commit.
|
| And then, you'd need to run a local Rekor log to use Sigstore
| attestations on every commit.
|
| Sigstore.dev is SLSA.dev compliant.
|
| Sigstore grants short-lived release attestation signing keys
| for CI builds on a build farm to sign artifacts with.
|
| So, when jujutsu autocommits agent-generated code, what
| causes there to be an {{AGENT_ID}} in the commit message or
| git notes? And what stops a user from forging such
| attestations?
| westurner wrote:
| - "Diffwatch - Watch AI agents touch the FS and see diffs
| live" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45786382
| :
|
| > _you can manually stage against @-:_ [with jujutsu]
| glemion43 wrote:
| It's not going to happen...
|
| Stop spamming
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| This is funny. I tried it once and didn't see what the
| benefit was. Then, when I tried to reset it back to normal
| git, I realized that the devs had not (at the time) made
| any clean way to revert it back, just a one-way conversion
| to jj. I haven't tried it since.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| What were you trying to "revert back"? You should have
| been able to just stop using jj, there's nothing to
| revert back to. It's also possible that I'm
| misunderstanding what you mean.
| dwattttt wrote:
| The feature of "there is no such thing as an uncommitted
| working directory" is very relevant to the situation.
| glemion43 wrote:
| It's not. There are so many ways to just solve this non
| issue that no one will just switch to just another random
| tool.
|
| Especially not away from git.
| _flux wrote:
| Amazing that these tools don't maintain a replayable log of
| everything they've done.
|
| Although git revert is not a destructive operation, so it's
| surprising that it caused any loss of data. Maybe they meant
| git reset --hard or something like that. Wild if Codec would
| run that.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Claude Code has /rewind. Not sure if it is foolproof, but
| this has been tried.
| rabf wrote:
| I have had codex recover things for me from its history after
| claude had done a git reset hard, codex is one of the more
| reliable models/harneses when it comes to performing undo and
| redo operations in my experience.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| I was looking at the insanity known as Gas Town [0] the other
| day, and it does use Git to store historical work state in
| something it calls "beads":
|
| https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown?tab=readme-ov-file
| calebkaiser wrote:
| If anyone is curious, Beads is an agent memory project from
| the same developer: https://github.com/steveyegge/beads
| PKop wrote:
| Bees?
| brap wrote:
| BEADS
| theptip wrote:
| Claude Code has had this feature for a few months now.
| CPLX wrote:
| I found this tool to be the solution I was looking for to
| address this specific problem:
|
| https://contextify.sh
| esafak wrote:
| Does Codex not let you set command permissions?
| alt227 wrote:
| I wonder how they accidentaly used a word like that.
| gbear605 wrote:
| "Please revert that last change you did", referring to like a
| smaller change that had just been done
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| Codex reverted kindly.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Interesting article but it doesn't actually discuss how well it
| performs at playing the game. There is in fact a 1.5 hour YouTube
| video but it woulda been nice for a bit of an outcome postmortem.
| It's like "here's the methods and set up section of a research
| paper but for the conclusion you need to watch this movie and
| make your own judgements!"
| cyanydeez wrote:
| I was told the important part of AI is the generation part, not
| the verification or quality.
| Sharlin wrote:
| It does discuss that? Basically it has good grasp of finances
| and often knows what "should" be done, but it struggles with
| actually building anything beyond placing toilets and hotdog
| stalls. To be fair, its map interface is not exactly optimal,
| and a multimodal model might fare quite a bit better at
| understanding the 2D map (verticality would likely still be a
| problem).
| nipponese wrote:
| > kept the context above the ~60% remaining level where coding
| models perform at their absolute best
|
| Maybe this is obvious to Claude users but how do you know your
| remaining context level? There is UI for this?
| neilfrndes wrote:
| Claude code has a /context command.
| adithyareddy wrote:
| You can also show context in the statusline within claude code:
| https://code.claude.com/docs/en/statusline#context-window-us...
| nipponese wrote:
| Follow up Q: what are you supposed to do when the context
| becomes too large? Start a new conversation/context window
| and let Claude start from scratch?
| kcoddington wrote:
| Either have Claude /compact or have it output things to a
| file it can read in on the next session. That file would be
| a summary of progress for work on a spec or something
| similar. Also good to prime it again with the Readme or any
| other higher level context
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| It feels like one could produce a digest of the context
| that works very similarly but fits in the available context
| window - not just by getting the LLM to use succinct
| language, but also mathematically; like reducing a sparse
| matrix.
|
| There might be an input that would produce that sort of
| effect, perhaps it looks like nonsense (like reading zipped
| data) but when the LLM attempts to do interactive in it the
| outcome is close to consuming the context?
| docjay wrote:
| ``` SSCONV_DIGESTSS T1:usr_query@llm-ctx-compression-
| math-analog(sparse-matrix|zip)?token-seq-nonsense-input-
| semantic-equiv-output? T2:rsp@asymmetry_problem:compress[
| ?]decompress|llm=predict!decode-no-bijective-map|soft-
| prompts[?]embedding-space!token-space+require-
| training|gisting(ICAE)=aux-model-compress-memory-
| tokens|token-compress-fails:nonlinear-distributed-
| mapping+syntax-semantic-entanglement|works[?]lossy-
| semantic-distill@task-specific+finetune=collapse-
| instruction-weights SST3:usr-design-full-python-implSS
| T4:arch_blueprint- DIR:src/context_compressor/{core/(base
| |result|pipeline)|compressors/(extractive|abstractive|sem
| antic|entity_graph|soft_prompt|gisting|hybrid)|embeddings
| /(providers|clustering)|evaluation/(metrics|task_performa
| nce|benchmark)|models/(base|openai|anthropic|local)|utils
| /(tokenization|text_processing|config)} CLASSES:Compressi
| onMethod=Enum(EXTRACTIVE|ABSTRACTIVE|SEMANTIC_CLUSTERING|
| ENTITY_GRAPH|SOFT_PROMPT|GISTING|HYBRID)|CompressionResul
| t@(original_text+compressed_text+original_tokens+compress
| ed_tokens+method+compression_ratio+metadata+soft_vectors?
| )|TokenCounter=Protocol(count|truncate_to_limit)|Embeddin
| gProvider=Protocol(embed|embed_single)|LLMBackend=Protoco
| l(generate|get_token_limit)|ContextCompressor=ABC(token_c
| ounter+target_ratio=0.25+min_tokens=50+max_tokens?-compre
| ss:abstract)|TrainableCompressor(ContextCompressor)+(trai
| n+save+load) COMPRESSORS:extractive-(TextRank|MMR|LeadSen
| tence)|abstractive-(LLMSummary|ChainOfDensity|Hierarchica
| lSummary)|semantic-(ClusterCentroid|SemanticChunk|Diversi
| tyMaximizer)|entity-(EntityRelation|FactList)|soft-(SoftP
| rompt|PromptTuning)|gist-(GistToken|Autoencoder)|hybrid-(
| Cascade|Ensemble|Adaptive) EVAL:EvaluationResult@(compres
| sion_ratio+token_reduction+embedding_similarity+entailmen
| t_score+entity_recall+fact_recall+keyword_overlap+qa_accu
| racy?+reconstruction_bleu?)-composite_score(weights)|Comp
| ressionEvaluator(embedding_provider+llm?+nli?)-evaluate|c
| ompare_methods PIPELINE:CompressionPipeline(steps:list[Co
| mpressor])-sequential-apply|AdaptiveRouter(compressors:di
| ct+classifier?)-content-based-routing
| DEPS:numpy|torch|transformers|sentence-transformers|tikto
| ken|networkx|sklearn|spacy|openai|anthropic|pandas|pydant
| ic+optional(accelerate|peft|datasets|sacrebleu|rouge-
| score) ```
| AlexMoffat wrote:
| I ask it to write a markdown file describing how it should
| go about performing the task. Then have it read the file
| next time. Works well for things like creating tests for
| controller methods where there is a procedure it should
| follow that was probably developed over a session with
| several prompts and feedback on its output.
| theptip wrote:
| It's a good idea to have Claude write down the execution
| plan (including todos). Or you can use something like
| Linear / GH Issues to track the big items. Then
| small/tactical todos are what you track in session todos.
|
| This approach means you can just kill the session and
| restart if you hit limits.
|
| (If you hit context limits you probably also want to look
| into sub-agents to help prevent context bloat. For example
| any time you are running and debugging unit tests, it's
| usually best to start with a subagent to handle the easy
| errors. )
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| Context filling up is sort of the Achilles heel of CLI
| agents. The main remedy is to have it output some type of
| handoff document and then run /compact which leaves you
| with a summary of the latest task. It sort of works but by
| definition it loses information, and you often find
| yourself having to re-explain or re-generate details to
| continue the work.
|
| I made a tool[1] that lets you just start a new session and
| injects the original session file path, so you can extract
| any arbitrary details of prior work from there using sub-
| agents.
|
| [1] aichat tool https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-
| tools?tab=readme-o...
| MattGaiser wrote:
| /context
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| Yes you can literally just ask Claude Code to create a status
| line showing context usage. I had it make this colored progress
| bar of context usage, changing thru green, yellow, orange, red
| as context fills up. Instructions to install:
|
| https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools?tab=readme-o...
| equinumerous wrote:
| This is a cool idea. I wanted to do something like this by adding
| a Lua API to OpenRCT2 that allows you to manipulate and inspect
| the game world. Then, you could either provide an LLM agent the
| ability to write and run scripts in the game, or program a more
| classic AI using the Lua API. This AI would probably perform much
| better than an LLM - but an interesting experiment nonetheless to
| see how a language model can fare in a task it was not trained to
| do.
| equinumerous wrote:
| As far as a scripting API, it looks like the devs beat me to it
| with a JS/TS plugin system:
| https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2/blob/develop/distributi...
| neom wrote:
| Wonder how it would do with Myst.
| alt227 wrote:
| Surely it must have digested plenty of walkthroughs for any
| game?
|
| A linear puzzle game like that I would just expect the ai to
| fly through first time, considering it has probably read 30
| years of guides and walkthroughs.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| The real test would be to try it on a new game of the same
| style and complexity
| ben_w wrote:
| Moravec's paradox likely comes in to play, what's easy is
| hard and vice versa.
|
| The puzzles would probably be easy. Myst's puzzles are
| basically IQ tests, and LLMs ace traditional IQ tests:
| https://trackingai.org/home
|
| On the other hand, navigating the environment, I think the
| models may fail spectacularly. From what we've seen from
| Claude Plays Pokemon, it would get in weird loops and try
| to interact with non-interactive elements of the
| environment.
| haunter wrote:
| This is what I want but for PoE/PoE2 builds. I always get a
| headache just looking at the passive tree
| https://poe.ninja/poe2/passive-skill-tree
| pocketarc wrote:
| I love the interview at the end of the video. The kubectl-
| inspired CLI, and the feedback for improvements from Claude, as
| well as the alerts/segmentation feedback.
|
| You could take those, make the tools better, and repeat the
| experience, and I'd love to see how much better the run would go.
|
| I keep thinking about that when it comes to things like this -
| the Pokemon thing as well. The quality of the tooling around the
| AI is only going to become more and more impactful as time goes
| on. The more you can deterministically figure out on behalf of
| the AI to provide it with accurate ways of seeing and doing
| things, the better.
|
| Ditto for humans, of course, that's the great thing about
| optimizing for AI. It's really just "if a human was using this,
| what would they need"? Think about it: The whole thing with the
| paths not being properly connected, a human would have to sit
| down and really think about it, draw/sketch the layout to
| visualize and understand what coordinates to do things in. And if
| you couldn't do that, you too would probably struggle for a
| while. But if the tool provided you with enough context to
| understand that a path wasn't connected properly and why, you'd
| be fine.
| wonnage wrote:
| I see this sentiment of using AI to improve itself a lot but it
| never seems to work well in practice. At best you end up with a
| very verbose context that covers all the random edge cases
| encountered during tasks.
|
| For this to work the way people expect you'd need to somehow
| feed this info back into fine tuning rather than just appending
| to context. Otherwise the model never actually "learns", you're
| just applying heavy handed fudge factors to existing weights
| through context.
| pilord314 wrote:
| I've been playing around with an AI generated knowledge base
| to grok our code base, I think you need good metrics on how
| the knowledge base is used. A few things is:
|
| 1. Being systematic. Having a system for adding, improving
| and maintaining the knoweldge base 2. Having feedback for
| that system 3. Implementing the feedback into a better system
|
| I'm pretty happy I have an audit framework and documentation
| standards. I've refactored the whole knowledge base a few
| times. In the places where it's overly specific or too narrow
| in it's scope of use for the retained knowledge, you just
| have to prune it.
|
| Any garden has weeds when you lay down fertile soil.
|
| Sometimes they aren't weeds though, and that's where having a
| person in the driver's seat is a boon.
| rnmmrnm wrote:
| this is cute but i imagined prompting the ai for a loop-di-loop
| roller coaster. If this could build complex ride it would be a
| game changer.
| blibble wrote:
| yeah I was expecting it to... do something in the game? like
| build a ride
|
| not just make up bullshit about events
| joshcsimmons wrote:
| Interesting this is on the ramp.com domain? I'm surprised in this
| tech market they can pay devs to hack on Rollercoaster Tycoon.
| Maybe there's some crossover I'm missing but seems like a sweet
| gig honestly.
| emeril wrote:
| yeah really - ramp.com is a credit card/expense platform that
| surely loses money right now...
|
| pretty heavy/slow javascript but pretty functional
| nonetheless...
| ulf-77723 wrote:
| This is brilliant SEO work, I doubt that they loose money
| with it. With 40h and some additional for the landingpage it
| might be an expensive link bait, but definitely worth it.
| Kudos!
|
| If not for SEO, it's building quite a good reputation for
| this company, they got a lot of open positions.
|
| I'm a big fan of transport tycoon, used to play it for hours
| as a kid and with Open Transport Tycoon it also might have
| been a good choice, but maybe not B2C?
| sodafountan wrote:
| This was an interesting application of AI, but I don't really
| think this is what LLMs excel at. Correct me if I'm wrong.
|
| It was interesting that the poster vibe-coded (I'm assuming) the
| CTL from scratch; Claude was probably pretty good at doing that,
| and that task could likely have been completed in an afternoon.
|
| Pairing the CTL with the CLI makes sense, as that's the only way
| to gain feedback from the game. Claude can't easily do spatial
| recognition (yet).
|
| A project like this would entirely depend on the game being open
| source. I've seen some very impressive applications of AI online
| with closed-source games and entire algorithms dedicated to
| visual reasoning.
|
| I'm still trying to figure out how this guy:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doec5gxhT_U
|
| Was able to have AI learn to play Mario Kart nearly perfectly. I
| find his work to be very impressive.
|
| I guess because RCT2 is more data-driven than visually
| challenging, this solution works well, but having an LLM try to
| play a racing game sounds like it would be disastrous.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Not sure if you clocked this, but the Mario Kart AI is not an
| LLM. It's a randomized neural net that was trained with
| reinforcement learning. Apologies if I misread.
| sodafountan wrote:
| Yeah, that was the point of my post. LLMs traditionally
| aren't used in gaming like this.
| sriram_sun wrote:
| > "Where Claude excels:"
|
| Am I reading a Claude generated summary here?
| alt227 wrote:
| I thought it sounded more like an ad for Claude written by
| Anthropic:
|
| > _" This was surprising, but fits with Claude's playful
| personality and flexible disposition."_
| vidarh wrote:
| This sounds _as expected_ to me as a heavy user of Opus.
| Claude absolutely has a "personality" that is a lot less
| formal and more willing to "play along" with more creative
| tasks than Codex. If you want an agent that's prepared to
| just jump in, it's a plus. If you want an agent that will be
| careful, considered and plan things out meticulously, it's
| not always so great - I feel that when you want Claude to do
| reptitive, tedious tasks, you need to do more work to prevent
| it from getting "bored" and try to take shortcuts or find
| something else to do, for example.
| alt227 wrote:
| > when you want Claude to do reptitive, tedious tasks, you
| need to do more work to prevent it from getting "bored"
|
| Is this sentance seriously about a computer? Have we gone
| so far that computers wont just do what we tell them to
| anymore?
| afro88 wrote:
| Yes I believe so. Also things like forcing a "key insight"
| summary after the excels vs struggles section.
|
| I would take any descriptions like "comprehensive",
| "sophisticated" etc with a massive grain of salt. But the nuts
| and bolts of how it was done should be accurate.
| Kapura wrote:
| "i vibe coded a thing to play video games for me"
|
| i enjoy playing video games my own self. separately, i enjoy
| writing code for video games. i don't need ai for either of these
| things.
| gordonhart wrote:
| Yeah, but can you use your enjoyment of video games as
| marketing material to justify a $32B valuation?
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| ^ this guy funds
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Not so sure. He said justify.
| Jaysobel wrote:
| actually it was all to drive traffic to my 'rollercoaster
| coasters' Etsy store
|
| https://bansostudio.etsy.com
| falloutx wrote:
| If you look at submissions from this website, its all just
| self glazing and "We did X with claude code"
| yawnr wrote:
| Haha exactly. This screams "we have too many people working
| here and don't know what to do with them".
| jsbisviewtiful wrote:
| AI for the sake of AI. Feels like a lot of the internet right
| now
| bigyabai wrote:
| That's fine. Tool-assisted speedruns long predate LLMs and
| they're boring as hell: https://youtu.be/W-MrhVPEqRo
|
| It's still a neat perspective on how to optimize for super-
| specific constraints.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| > Tool-assisted speedruns long predate LLMs and they're
| boring as hell
|
| You and I have _very_ different definitions for the word
| boring. A lot of effort goes into TAS runs.
| ai_ wrote:
| That TAS is spliced. The stairs beyond the door aren't
| loaded, you need the key to load it.
|
| This is a real console 0-star TAS:
| https://youtu.be/iUt840BUOYA
| echelon wrote:
| You do you. I find this exceedingly cool and I think it's a fun
| new thing to do.
|
| It's kind of like how people started watching Let's Plays and
| that turned into Twitch.
|
| One of the coolest things recently is VTubers in mocap suits
| using AI performers to do single person improv performances
| with. It's wild and cool as hell. A single performer creating a
| vast fantasy world full of characters.
|
| LLMs and agents playing Pokemon and StarCraft? Also a ton of
| fun.
| rangestransform wrote:
| I actually think it would be pretty fun to code something to
| play video games for me, it has a lot of overlap with robotics.
| Separately, I learned about assembly from cheat engine when I
| was a kid.
| markbao wrote:
| That's not the point of this. This was an exercise to measure
| the strengths and weaknesses of current LLMs in operating a
| company and managing operations, and the video game was just
| the simulation engine.
| phreeza wrote:
| Claude Code in dwarf fortress would be wild
| rsanek wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLmPN03ZQbM
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Given dwarf fortress has an ASCII interface it may actually be
| a lot easier to set up claude to work with it. Also, a lot of
| the challenges of dwarf fortress is just knowing all the
| different mechanics and how they work which is something claude
| should be good at.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| I corroborate that spatial reasoning is a challenge still. In
| this case, it's the complexity of the game world, but anyone who
| has used Codex/Claude with complex UIs in CSS or a native UI
| library will recognize the shortcomings fairly quickly.
| js4ever wrote:
| Most interesting phrase: "Keeping all four agents busy took a lot
| of mental bandwidth."
| rashidae wrote:
| > As a mirror to real-world agent design: the limiting factor for
| general-purpose agents is the legibility of their environments,
| and the strength of their interfaces. For this reason, we prefer
| to think of agents as automating diligence, rather than
| intelligence, for operational challenges.
| Jaysobel wrote:
| Author here - some bonus links!
|
| Session transcript using Simon Willison's claude-code-transcripts
|
| https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://gist.githubuserconten...
|
| Reddit post
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1q9fen5/claude_co...
|
| OpenRCT2!!
|
| https://github.com/jaysobel/OpenRCT2
|
| Project repo
|
| https://github.com/jaysobel/OpenRCT2
| theptip wrote:
| Did you eval using screenshots or some sort of rendered
| visualization instead of the CLI? I wonder if Claude has better
| visual intelligence when viewing images (lots of these in its
| training set) rather than ascii schematics (probably very few
| of these in the corpus).
| Jaysobel wrote:
| I had tried the browser screenshotting feature for agents in
| Cursor and found it wasn't very reliable - screenshots eat a
| lot of context, and the agent didn't have a good sense for
| when to use them. I didn't try it in this project. I bet it
| would work in some specific cases.
| nanapipirara wrote:
| Claude helped me immensely getting an image converter to
| work. Giving it screenshots of wrong output (lots of layers
| had an unpredictable offsets that was not supposed to be
| there) and output as I expected it helped Claude understand
| the problems and it fixed the bugs immediately.
| kinduff wrote:
| It's been several times that I see ASCII being used initially for
| these kinds of problems. I think it's because its counter-
| intuitive, in the sense that for us humans ASCII is text but we
| tend to forget spacial awareness.
|
| I find this very interesting of us humans interacting with AIs.
| deadbabe wrote:
| While this seems cool at first, it does not demonstrate
| superiority over a true custom built AI for rollercoaster tycoon.
|
| It is a curiosity, good for headlines, but the takeaway is if you
| really need an actual good AI, you are still better off not using
| an LLM powered solution.
| colesantiago wrote:
| > We don't know any C++ at all, and we vibe-coded the entire
| project over a few weeks.
|
| And these are the same people that put countless engineers
| through gauntlets of bizarre interview questions and exotic
| puzzles to hire engineers.
|
| But when it comes to C++ just vibe it obviously.
| falloutx wrote:
| Oh, I almost didn't realise this is done by a company. I was
| like this must have costed a lot, didn't realize its just an
| advertisement for ramp
| margorczynski wrote:
| I think something like Civilization would be better because:
|
| 1) The map is a grid
|
| 2) Turn based
| fuzzy_lumpkins wrote:
| so the janitors will finally stay on their assigned footpaths?
| petcat wrote:
| Question: There is still a competitive AoE2 community. Will that
| be destroyed by AI?
| pbmonster wrote:
| Dota 2 is a real time strategy game with an arguably more
| complex micro game (but a far simpler macro game than AoE2, but
| that's far easier for an AI to master), and OpenAI Five
| completely destroyed the reigning champions. In 2019. Perfect
| coordination between units, superhuman mechanical skill,
| perfect consistency.
|
| I see no reason why AoE2 would be any different.
|
| Worth noting that openAI Five was mostly deep reinforcement
| learning and massive distributed training, it didn't use image
| to text and an LLM for reasoning about what it sees to make its
| "decisions". But that wouldn't be a good way to do an AI like
| that anyway.
|
| Oh, and humans still play Dota. It's still a highly competitive
| community. So that wasn't destroyed at all, most teams now use
| AI to study tactics and strategy.
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