Related: this article was very unilkely make it to the Hacker News homepage thanks to the clickbait headline, but I recommend reading it anyway: https://twitter.com/jsnnsa/status/2115623382721126826

It describes a team spending 30x payroll on tokens - $3,000,000 in token spend per month - building a multiplayer game where incidents and bug reports from users are passed directly to Fable 5/5.1 agents who then act on them and deploy the changes to production.

"We consider it an outage if we don't ship every hour"

It's worth reading because it's either a complete disaster or a glimpse of the future, or quite possibly both.

Oh it's Jacob - I used to work w/ him on his acquired startup, Pluto. He was very AI-pilled; I'm not surprised at the results. I remember wading through the AI-generated Python he had written. I think Pluto had something like 500k or 700k lines after 18mo. Everything was duplicated; there was no reuse of anything. Dozens of features, which mostly worked, not all did.

As a product that I would regularly use, Pluto missed the mark for me. As a SWE in 2023, I couldn't meet Jacob's mentality. Today, it's how a lot of us ship software.

I didn't love the product but I have to respect the process: he was able to sell his company. For some, what he did is success.

well, i did go check out the company spawn from the article. its certainly interesting how hands off their process is and how much they ship, but holy shit the games were fucking horrible. there was a direct WoW ripoff (right down to the assets) that was unplayable, a racing simulator where my controls stopped working 10 second in, and some sort of RPG that i started and just never loaded. so i will take what they are saying with the heaviest possible grain of salt.

So as a user I can basically deploy code through bug reports? Sounds like a prompt injection nightmare.

This is amazing and somewhat insane. It's more like they are building an organism with an immune system than a code base. Interesting that they say only Fable works for them.

Was thinking of that exact article while I was reading this, we must be following the same folks. Highly recommend folks reading it, even if it feels insane in some regards it's a fascinating look at what the limits of this stuff could be and I found myself with a lot of new ideas to consider after reading it. Interesting times.

Edit - after writing "we must be following the same folks" I realized that you are, in fact, Simon Willison - I saw this article because you posted about it on X, haha.

This is a complete and utter disaster. They are making spam games. Like miniclips but for spam. A semi functional website to make what is basically youtube playables.

And it's devouring tens of millions. I know what tens of millions can make in the video game industry, it can keep a small team of good devs and designers and artists making something special that's _really_ enjoyed by tens of thousands of people.

We don't want more games, we want more great games. This will never, ever, make great games.

https://www.spawn.co

Look on ye mighty, and despair. I really don't care how this sausage was made because the only thing you need to know is that it shouldn't ever have been made.

What's their revenue?

Do players like it?

Will the history of gaming remember this game?

Or it’s a fabrication of some kind. Some times people lie to make themselves look good. Or the omit important details.

This works as we've been doing it since Opus 4.5 (Nov 2025) with every user request, feature and bug. It's the future without a doubt. The feedback loops evolve and get stronger depending on how well you fine-tune or train your system to optimize on its own.

so if there's no user reports and fable isn't shipping in the middle of the night, then it's an outage?

> A default that made Savi think longer on every message, landed at 10:22pm and reverted by 10:40pm: that's not right, undo it it's too slow and not jazz.

I giggled on that one. It feels like children playing having a job. If they pay that much for tokens they have to have at least 80k customers paying 50$ a month. Seems huge for something like that. Or they have a lot of investors. Anyway does not feel like something going anywhere.

Are they even making 3M per month?

Isn't there a point where you're shipping too fast that the product hasn't even caught on enough yet to know what to build?

I looked at some of the games and it just looks like a Roblox clone

This from that tweet stood out to me: "In general, we've seen that OpenAI's models game their own checks"

In the past when working on agentic stuff I've observed models gaming checks aggressively, to the point that when we were validating log files to see what the agent had done, the agent responded by editing the log files to pass validation. I can only imagine how bad that kind of behavior is at scale, and it sounds like they ran into it.

"We consider it an outage if we don't ship every hour" is the dumbest thing I've ever read.

I really mean this. Does it benefit the business? Does it benefit the users? When you optimize for the wrong thing, you inevitably fail.