If you just want to check out the game: Play Drilly Willy

A week ago when Grok 3 came out I had a silly idea for a game.

I saw a tweet from eigenrobot about how “guys just one thing and it’s digging”.

So yeah lots of silly digging games out there. So I decided to build my own because I also love digging!

I asked Grok 3 to build it and it became this pretty cool thing. I asked it to add gimmicky controls like flappy bird to make it hard to steer.

Then I added gold coins and bombs that you can dig up.

This is what it looked like at first:

Honestly it worked very well straight from the start. But it was a bit boring and I almost kind of gave up on it. I didn’t really know how to improve it.

Then Claude 3.7 came out and I asked it to create a digging game, basically gave it exactly the same instructions as I gave Grok 3. But honestly it completely messed up and got confused so I was like ok Claude 3.7 is overhyped and honestly pretty shit. The game didn’t work at all but it had some interesting dynamics and cool features (as far as I could see from the generated code).

So then I gave Claude the code that Grok generated and to use that code but make it better.

And it just completely blew me away. It added lots of interesting little things, came up with these cool particles that made it look nice etc.

Here’s what it looked like:

And then I asked it to make it as addictive and fun as possible. And it started adding more and more stuff. And I added sounds, more visual effects, more interesting game dynamics like powerups etc. Experimented with the difficulty level etc.

I just kept saying to make it more addictive.

So OK at this point it was a pretty fun game to be completely honest. I could really play it myself for like 20 minutes and not get bored.

This was the game at that point:

But then I noticed it ran smoothly on my mac, but it just completely fucked up on my iPhone. It just lagged like hell because of all the particles and special effects. So I asked Claude to fix it. And it kind of did some stuff but then started repeating itself and got stuck, thinking it was adding stuff that were already in there.

So OK then I asked Grok again to fix it up and it made a lot of aggressive improvements to reduce lag on mobile and it just.. kind of worked? It fixed most issues by eliminating excessive particles, batching them up and stuff like that.

The complete codebase right now is about 4k lines of code. Which is mindblowing to me. Both Grok and Claude can perfectly dig around in it and fix stuff. It’s crazy how good it’s becoming.

Honestly I’m a bit scared for my job because this is the level of complexity where as a developer you sometimes start to get confused yourself.

I can just ask it to do stuff and it does it, and I iterate on that. I didn’t write a single line myself. Sometimes it does help to understand the code to know where to make the edits exactly (as you can’t just ask the LLM to generate 4k lines of code each time).

I still made a lot of editorial and creative decisions in this process, but basically anyone can make these types of games now, whether you’re a coder or not. The hip term for it is vibe coding and I’m all for it. Just vibes. Crazy world we live in.

This was my 7th creation for Brainbun and the first “real” one. In the sense that it’s not just a blog post. Pretty proud and happy. Hopefully I’ll get to more complex projects soon and maybe eve some that could make some money. Let’s see.

Happy vibe coding everyone.

You can play the game here: Play Drilly Willy