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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1mo ago (text post)   592 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for June 16th, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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I abandoned/paused my last attempt at coding my own videogame since I got bogged down in tons of pedantic technical details until I lost motivation for a few months. I am self taught at programming and have to look up every little feature if I've never used it before and it's annoying.

I heard some people talking about Vibe coding, making the entire thing without writing any code yourself, and figured I'd give it a try. I'm working with Google Gemini free tier, and it seems okay so far. The idea being I'm doing all of the actual game design decisions but it can implement them way faster than I can with approximately the same number of bugs (which in turn it can fix when I point them out). I am very impressed with its ability to make a workable prototype near instantly and put a bunch of placeholder stuff so I can test things bit by bit while having background stuff functioning, but am worried that its performance will degrade as the code increases. Has anyone else tried Vibe coding? Any recommendations?

(If it matters, the game is an Idle game somewhat similar to Increlution, so doesn't have fancy graphics or physics or stuff, and is mostly clicking on buttons in various menus)

Fun! Vibe coded game development has gotten better and better over the last few months. It sounds like you're fairly new to coding with AI (forgive me if I'm off the mark with that guess).

This article has a good showcase of what the top-tier model(s) from Anthropic/OpenAI can pull off: What it feels like to work with Mythos

In your case, I'd recommend just watching the video at the top of the blog post, with the following in mind:

All of these are one initial prompt in Claude Code where Fable had to take my vague prompts and generate something workable, followed by a couple of additional prompts with minor encouragement (“make it better”) or feedback. What makes these especially impressive is that Claude cannot generate images, so every piece of art or 3D object was made with math alone, not using any external assets.

With that out of the way; the free google models are a great starting point, and I'm sure you'll be impressed at how fast & precise the outputs are. That said, there's a significant difference in capabilities between the free versions of the models & the frontier (best at the time) versions, especially when you pair those frontier models with coding "agents" (software that allows for fast, targeted control of your personal machine).

For the time being, stick with the free models. Have fun, try crazy stuff, see what works & what doesn't. If you notice that the outputs aren't coming out how you'd hoped, sink a few hours into some youtube tutorials. I'm sure there are great independent creators, but there's just so much noise that I tend to just default to the easiest route - videos from the AI labs themselves. This one looks fine: Prompting 101: Code w/ Claude

You'll squeeze more juice out of the free models if you use the techniques described in the video, but eventually you'll get fed up with the mistakes that gemini is making. At that point, it's probably worth spending $20 to get a subscription to one of the top labs. I'm partial to anthropic & claude, but that's probably just because I use it so much through work.

Good luck!

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