Battle Drones is a browser‑based, Command & Conquer‑style real‑time strategy game that evolved through 12 major iterations, adding 3D models, varied terrain, random map generation, and both local and online multiplayer via audio synchronization. The game features nine buildings, seven ground vehicles, six aerial vehicles, and three infantry units, with fog of war, area‑effect weapons, and multiple play modes such as skirmish and last‑stand. The project showcases how AI‑assisted coding (primarily Claude) can accelerate game development and introduce innovative multiplayer mechanics using sound.
Stop Making TUIs Thomas Ptacek advocates for building real native user interfaces for even the smallest of personal tools, because coding agents have reduced the cost of getting a usable-enough GUI up and running to almost nothing. I wrote about my vibe-coded bandwidth and GPU monitoring macOS task bar apps back in March , and I'm still using both of those on a daily basis.
Simon Willison released a new Newsletters page for his blog, listing all his free weekly Substack and monthly sponsor-only updates. He built the feature almost entirely using voice commands with Codex in the ChatGPT desktop app, interacting with his local Django development environment while cooking dinner. The process involved creating a new model, migration, view code, templates, and import functions to populate the database from external sources, all guided by his spoken instructions.
Google has launched two new Gemini text‑to‑speech models—gemini‑3.8‑flash‑tts and gemini‑3.8‑flash‑lite‑tts—offering a library of over 2,000 voices and the option to create a custom voice from a 30‑second audio sample. The author built a playground interface that lets users define multi‑character conversations with distinct voices and styles, and demonstrated it with a scripted dialogue between two pelicans. Generating 1 minute 18 seconds of audio with the Flash model took about 20 seconds and cost 2.74 cents.
The article announces the release of the official music video for "DE STAAT - FREEDOM" by Dutch alternative rock band De Staat. It notes that at 00:44 in the video, visual effects are credited to Matties Grooten of Fake it or Leave it. The post also mentions the video’s presence on Hacker News and tags it with music, AI, generative‑AI, and pelican‑riding‑a‑bicycle.
Simon Willison discusses a new inflection point in October 2026 for creating video games using AI, noting that Claude Opus 5.5 now reliably produces compelling 3D models, music, and especially game design. He reports having successfully "vibe coded" four enjoyable games without inspecting the code, and highlights that the real challenge is now generating novel, delightful concepts that AI alone could not conceive. The author compares Opus 5.5’s fun factor to GPT‑6 Astra, which he finds lacking in that regard.
Simon Willison experimented with Claude Opus 5.5 to compose computer game music, specifically aiming for a style reminiscent of the original *Secret of Monkey Island*. He designed a simple text-based format for the music and built an artifact capable of playing it, including example tracks. The results were surprisingly good, prompting questions about whether this compositional ability is a new capability emerging in recent text models.
SF October 14th: A Birds of a Feather Session on Agentic Engineering
I'm hosting an evening event with Jesse Vincent in San Francisco on Wednesday 14th October for people who are building weird and in...
Posted by Zheng Xu, Research Scientist, and Yanxiang Zhang, Software Engineer, Google Language models (LMs) trained to predict the next word given input text are the key technology for many applications [ 1 , 2 ]. In Gboard , LMs are used to improve users’ typing experience by supporting features like next word prediction (NWP), Smart Compose , smart completion and suggestion , slide to type , and proofread .
By Google AI
Simon Willison introduces GPT‑6 Astra, a new model that offers improved attention to detail, better prompt comprehension, and the ability to generate more sophisticated outputs. The model excels at creating 3D renderings, producing detailed scenes such as gardens, shipyards, animals, cityscapes, and even Dyson spheres. Willison highlights its whimsical creativity, noting examples like a pelican wearing a red neckerchief riding a bicycle.
Panache is a real‑time strategy game for mobile and browser set in France’s Belle Époque around 1900, featuring steampunk elements such as dirigibles, steam‑powered trucks, armored ships, and marching fortresses. The game was released under an Apache 2.0 license and already has a French‑language fork that reskins it to a steampunk 1900s France, adding an animated intro and French‑twisted music. The updates are mainly aesthetic, with new models and an intro video showcased on the game’s page.
Simon Willison presented a closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America, where he showcased a pixel‑art animation of kakapo parrots celebrating a record‑breaking breeding season in 2026. He used Claude Opus 5.5 to generate the animation from Google‑searched kakapo photos, then employed Claude Code with Playwright to record a 15‑second video of the animated HTML5 canvas, which he embedded in his Keynote slide.