Among games written for $550 in 8 hours including the art it's pretty good.

No, it isn't. With $550 you could buy ten really good games made by someone who knows how to make games, or spend it on something else you enjoy or invest it. If he wasn't a manager at Anthropic this would be $550 of money wasted. Nobody will enjoy the game. Nobody will buy it. Nobody learned anything from it.

You just confused the cost of producing a game with the cost of buying a game, lol

It's really not, you're just incapable of being honest with yourself on this.

$550 spent and what value was gained? No one was entertained, no one would buy it, no one will remember it by next week.

$550 wasn't spent. That was the "API pricing" value, but the author was on a monthly subscription plan so the tokens were already covered.

The guy who posted this is literally a manager at Anthropic, so for him this was free of charge.

Oh, I missed that. Yeah, Anthropic employees all have effectively unlimited tokens.

Just because they aren't charging that now doesn't mean their investors aren't expecting to charge that in future.

Monthly sub is a lie and should not be considered when looking at pricing.

The value was the joy in creating it. We shouldn’t pass judgement on other people for things like this. I don’t enjoy collecting coins or bird watching, but don’t mind if other people do. The amount of money spent creating it changes the conversation a bit, but people spend money on trivial things with no perceived value.

We’re moving into a new era where AI is used by a certain range of people (computer enthusiasts) like the earlier days of the internet. Wait until grandma starts using AI like when everyone started using the internet. Look at how that turned out. We’re not there yet, but that’s what you need to worry about.

for a one shot prompt and web based, it is not terrible i think. I mean no one is going to pay for this game

Does it forego using a game engine?

Like all these "games" it's using three.js

The other day I had Claude Opus 5.5 rewrite a three.js prototype - https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/Hidden-Reef-Egg... - in vanilla JavaScript and it did it just fine: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/Hidden-Reef-Egg...

"The other day I traced a picture of the Mona Lisa and I did it just fine, I am now a renaissance painter"

Now, substitute yourself with my robot: "The other day my robot traced a picture of the Mona Lisa and I did it just fine, my robot is now a renaissance painter"

This is such a broken line of thinking, I can't even begin to understand it.

In this particular case I didn't imply that I had done ANY of the work. You appear to have a bee in your bonnet.

It's not a game - its a tech demo.

We've already seen that it can make web games that nobody wants to play.

three js already has loads of tech demos, don't need Claude doing more for them.

But just think how quickly you can now make so many terrible games.