Woah! This is very timely. My 9-year-old has been playing around with Claude Code and creating games, mostly with Phaser. He's dabbling with some 3D games and I was just looking at Godot as an option yesterday.
I've already started loading all of my incoming tax forms into a folder so that I can attempt the same, so it's helpful to see someone do it and the tips.
I understand the risks with it but I don't care. I cannot fucking wait for the SaaSpocalypse to hit these companies.
I've spent so much of my career as a data gopher, so I really appreciate this. It always works much, much better when people have direct access to data... but success always relied on getting business users to be a bit more technical.
I built a version of this in my org as a slack bot. It has access to BigQuery and I worked with it to document and define the key tables, so when a user asks a question it has a "library" to figure out how to answer it. Then it will respond directly in Slack (plus respond to f/up questions in the thread) and if it's a bigger/more detailed question it can create the report in Metabase and send a link.
One thing I don't have is the governance aspect, so I may give this a spin to see if this is a good middle layer.
Looking forward to getting your feedback if you get a chance to play around! It takes less than a few minutes to get set up and starting experimenting with it. Deploying coded dashboards is super good fun as well - deploying correct data in seconds is pretty mindblowing how difficult it was to get things up and running in the past
I can't wait to play with this, thank you for releasing!
I've done lots and lots of financial modeling/budgeting/forecasting in my career. The biggest drag is having to pull in actuals for the prior month, mapping them into the model, etc.
Just about a month ago I used Claude to build a set of scripts that pulls financial data from QuickBooks, operational data from BigQuery and pushes that all into our model in Google Sheets. The biggest pain was definitely connecting to QB because I had to create a developer account to get a key, etc.
I'm a 15+ year user of 1password and have been telling myself to move off of it for like 5 years now. It ain't the price... $72 is really fine for good software that just works.
But as mentioned throughout the thread it's really just too much. My goodness they really could have a nice, profitable, business with simple software. I'd happily pay $10/month for the version of 1password from 15 years ago! It's just all too much.
The VC treadmill ruined what should be a simple, sustainable business. They’re not going to light the world on fire trying to pedal a password manager as the be all and end all IAM story for enterprises. It’s not the amount of the increase. It’s that they’re chasing enterprise for VC unicorn status and clearly intending to leave their original market behind. I don’t want my passwords in a product becoming more and more derelict since the org’s heart is in another place.
This is great and I’d love to hear more about what worked / what didn’t / how you achieved these results.
A couple of months ago I worked with my 9 year old to have Claude build a little game with threejs. We’ve now got three levels with characters shooting silly string and banana guns. It was really fun to see him imagine something, have it show up on the screen, and iterate it.
Anyway, I tried building an LLM-backed workflow that could guide kids through the game creation process and kids can see their idea come to like (think: “sparkly purple unicorn shoots stars at a dragon”). I couldn’t _quite_ get it to work like I wanted so I shelved it pending future ideas/improved models.
Some background. I'm a 20-year software full-stack developer (started with Ruby on Rails, then moved to Node.js. These days doing a lot of Next.js/React, and some Svelte in my spare time) - as well as Astro.
So, last year after finishing a contract at Volvo Cars, I took some downtime and dabbled with learning Svelte, and managed to recreate a silly little prank I made when I was working at a web agency called New Bamboo many years ago. That little prank then got iterated on, and is now the music editor app at https://lets-make-sweet-music.com.
After that, I created a simple ball-table game using Svelte and Threlte, which is a wrapper around the excellent ThreeJS library. Once I realised that Threlte had support for Rapier physics, I realised that I could make a game, so I made this: https://3d-garden.vercel.app
Usually when you hit a blocking issue, you'd google around and probably end up on Stack Overflow. But last year I increasingly found myself using ChatGPT (I have a $20pm subscription) to ask questions and copy/paste snippets of code for suggestions on how to resolve a blocker.
That process turned out to yield some good results, so I was able to iterate on my ideas and get quite far. My only real limitation is that I have a tendency to lose interest in projects and end up jumping from one project to the next. I also started looking at making a LLM-bot interface to try and create a cyclical loop of bots making other bots do things and implementing the feedback loop.
I also managed to implement an isometric game engine based on an example I'd made using Löve2D (a game engine in Lua), but this time written in TypeScript and using HTML5 canvas. I managed to work on that for quite a bit, but as usual ran out of passion.
In theory, if I can resurrect my passion on it, then I could get it to the stage where it would be possible to play a SimCity-2000/3000 like game entirely in the web browser.
Based on the work across those side projects, I managed to extract out a library for emitting events http://github.com/anephenix/event-emitter - the purpose being to easily decouple Svelte components and make the logic within those components more modular.
I took up the opportunity to work with a former boss at an e-commerce company based in Sweden, so I recently moved here. It was during that time that I learned that the team had been dabbling with Claude Code, which I hadn't used at all.
I then decided one weekend to have a go at trying to build a pixel editor for Babsland, but rather than do it by hand, I decided to try out Claude Code with the Zed Editor (I needed to switch from VS Code because my apartment didn't have electricity for the 1st week, so I relied on charging devices at work and a great hotel - Scandic Centralen in Gothenburg). I realised that VS Code being an Electron app (after all I wrote a book on Electron and Nw.js) was using a lot of battery, so I switched to Zed.
In a couple of hours at the hotel, I managed to build the beginnings of a pixel editor - which is now https://www.babspixel.com. It was a revelation of an experience.
You can see an example of dragging and dropping a MIDI file of Guns 'n Roses Welcome to the Jungle and playing it with the guitar instrument.
I also managed to code up a silly little game called "Mr Spanky's Meatballs" where you lob meatballs are characters and try to survive for as long as you can, again built in a few hours with Claude Code.
The golf game was an idea I joked with making with my former colleagues from New Bamboo (we keep in touch online to this day, a testament to how good that group of developers were). I then started coding it with Claude Code on Friday evening, and posted about it less than a day later.
I'm using the Claude Code Pro subscription ($20pm), not the Max subscription, so I regularly run into the session quota limits, but that's fine because that allows me to sleep and have a normal work/hobbies/life balance.
As someone who I guess you could describe as a creative developer, I'm so excited by what is possible with these AI tools, and I think that in terms of the software industry, the genie is out of the bottle - I think the biggest challenge is going to be ensuring that the quality of the output improves and meets the threshold we expect - for example, that game has various bugs which others in the comments have noted.
For games and fun side-projects, I'm happy to delegate the coding to AI tools and perform a manual feedback loop of asking it to make one feature/fix at a time, reviewing the output, and either iterating on that, or moving onto the next feature/fix to do.
As for work, I'm not yet confident enough to use AI tools the way I have been using them with side projects. In fact the first thing we're doing with our new project is putting E2E tests in using Cucumber and Playwright so that we can verify that the application (the combo of backend, frontend, databases and other services) works and that we can have confidence in deploying it when those E2E tests pass.
I think that we are in a major transition phases in our industry, and that there is still work to be done to yield the results we want from AI (in terms of quality, accuracy, not hallucinating libraries or API calls that do not exist).
I also want to say that having spent years working with React, I really love the developer experience of using Svelte, and I choose to use it for my side projects now.
I'm thrilled that you and other people are taking it and running with it! That was the whole point of making it free: it was inspired by Seymour Papert's Constructionist philosophy, Alan Kay's ideas, and the mission of the OLPC.
EA granted the right to use the trademark "SimCity" only if it passed their QA process, and it was quite an ordeal hand holding their QA department through running Linux in a VM on Windows to test it.
Since I never want to go through that ever again, I asked Will Wright for a suggestion about the name, and he recommended its original working title, Micropolis.
At the time, he had to change the name to SimCity because Micropolis was a hard disk drive manufacturer. They eventually changed names then went out of business, but was recently restructured under the name Micropolis GmbH.
Fortunately the owner of Micropolis GmbH is really cool, an old school hacker, who was generous enough to grant the Micropolis Public Name License that allows the game to use the name Micropolis under reasonable conditions:
He and I will give this a spin this weekend.