Vibe coding a 3D multiplayer game in 15 minutes—with no game dev experience | Cody De Arkland (Senior Director of Developer Experience at Sentry)

Cody De Arkland is the senior director of developer experience at Sentry, leading a team that empowers developers to build and ship software with greater safety and efficiency. Watch him speed-run the creation of a 3D multiplayer flight simulator—from scratch—in just 15 minutes, demonstrating the power (and creativity) that vibe coding enables. What you’ll learn: • How to approach building complex applications with AI by starting broad and iterating on specific features • The process of using multiple AI coding assistants simultaneously to build different components • Techniques for learning new technologies and frameworks through AI-assisted exploration • How to troubleshoot and fix issues when AI implementations don’t work as expected • The parallels between building fun projects and enterprise software with AI assistance • Strategies for keeping AI tools focused when they go off track or add unwanted features • The incredible velocity and productivity gains possible with modern AI coding tools • How anyone can now build sophisticated applications with minimal prior experience — Brought to you by: ⁠Enterpret⁠ https://enterpret.com/howIAI—Customer superintelligence platform for product and CX teams ⁠WorkOS⁠ https://workos.com/?utm_source=lennys_howiai&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=q22025—Make your app enterprise-ready today with WorkOS — Where to find Cody De Arkland: Website: https://codyde.io/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/codydearkland/ X: https://x.com/Codydearkland GitHub: https://github.com/codyde — Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Cody (02:45) AI tools he’s using (04:38) How Cody vibe coded a multiplayer game: Spaceflight (09:37) Demo: Starting a new flight simulator project from scratch (13:49) How to learn about libraries and technologies for projects (17:06) First run of the new flight simulator game (19:26) Using multiple AI coding assistants simultaneously (20:43) Unexpected features and visual improvements (21:26) Testing the multiplayer functionality (22:31) Reflecting on the development process and iteration (26:47) Lightning round and final thoughts — Tools referenced: • Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/ • Windsurf: https://windsurf.com/ • Claude: https://claude.ai/new • Bolt: https://bolt.new/ http://v/ • React: https://react.dev/ • v0: https://v0.dev/ — Other references: • Sentry: https://sentry.io/ • MCP: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol • Spaceflight: http://spaceflight.gg/ • Three.js: https://threejs.org/ • Socket.io: https://socket.io/ — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We're talking about games and talking about building games here, but the same thing translates really well to like when you're building actual applications too. A lot of times you're starting with this blank framework and you're giving it like a broad idea of the thing you want to make and then you're diving into these individual features.

• 0:14Claire Vo?

  What are your sources for figuring out how to scaffold with existing technologies?

• 0:18Speaker 00

  A lot of times I'll ask the AI, if I wanted to build a game and I wanted it to run inside of a browser, which technologies make the most sense? Like it'll go through and tell you like, in this case, it was like 3JS is an option, but then picking those things out and starting to do deep dives on it like traditional Google and taking that and feeding that back into LLM. So it almost becomes like a conversation with another developer where you're like, hey, I learned this thing from the internet. Can you implement this in the game? And like having it tell you if it's a good idea or not.

• 0:42Claire Vo?

  I just think that's a really interesting process that nets out net positive.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  Like as far as like creating velocity and creating speed, I think that's like the really cool thing here is like, yeah, it wasn't perfect, but we got it doing the main things that we wanted it to pretty painlessly. We're in this time period where everyone can go and do this.

• 1:01Claire Vo?

  Welcome to How I AI. I'm Claire, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have a very fun conversation with Cody D. Arkland, Senior Director of Developer Experience at Sentry. Cody is one of the most prolific vibe coders I know, doing everything from building personal to do apps for his family to automating just about everything you could automate at work. But today we're doing something extra fun. Cody's going to speed run building a 3D multiplayer game live on the show. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Interprint. Interprint is a customer intelligence platform used by leading CX and product orgs like Canva, Notion, Strava, Hinge and Linear

• 1:44Claire Vo?

  to leverage the voice of the customer and build best in-class products. Interprint unifies all customer conversations in real time. From Gong recordings to Zendesk tickets to Twitter threads, it makes it available for your team for analysis. What makes Interprint unique is its ability to build and update a customer-specific knowledge graph that provides the most granular and accurate categorization of all customer feedback and connects that feedback to critical metrics like revenue and CSAP. If modernizing your voice of the customer program to a generational upgrade is a 2025 priority, like customer-centric industry leaders Canva, Notion and Linear, reach out to the team at interpret.com/HowIAI.

• 2:27Claire Vo?

  That's E N T E R P R E T dot com slash how I A I. Okay, Cody, I hate to admit when people vibe code harder than I do, but I believe that you are one of a very few set of people who do vibe code more than I do. So tell me the, the truth. What is up on your screen right now? What are you working on?

• 2:53Speaker 00

  Oh, God. So I tend to look at the different tools as like little junior developers who are helping me work on different things. So I tend to keep a lot of tools up at any given time because they're all working on different parts. And so I'm going to go just share my screen and we're, we're going to take a tour of what's running on, on Cody's desktop.

• 3:11Claire Vo?

  Maybe I'll keep a running tab if I'm running the same.

• 3:15Speaker 00

  That, that's fun. All right. So I was in, I was working on a little, a little bit of a page or a like a web performance. That's a little bit of a work test. So I, I work at Sentry and so I was working on some things for real work there. Behind the scenes though, I've also got Cursor as well as Windsurf up because I really can't decide which one that I like more at any given moment. So I just use them both and I use them both often. So I've got both of those. I was doing some work inside of MCP and so I have Claude up and was doing, doing some things inside of, inside of there. Inside of Windsurf, I was playing around with the, the game I built, which I think we're going to talk a little bit about, a little bit about later on. Cursor is dived into a little application that I was building for, you know, testing, testing Sentry things out.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  And then again, tons, tons of stuff in Bolt, both things like that are work related, but then also diving into some just like personal applications that are just fun for, for home productivity. So what is that? Windsurf, Cursor, Claude, I have Claude code open inside of, inside of my terminal. Yeah, we're all over, we're all over the pace. We are truly unhinged in AI today.

• 4:21Claire Vo?

  Yes, I think you, you have me beat at least, at least right now. I am not currently coding while doing, doing this podcast. So you are right. I actually want to talk about something a little different today because I've seen a lot of your work product generated by AI. I've seen some of your personal productivity tools and what we call meme apps, these like little micro apps that you've built with Bolt. But the most impressive AI thing I've seen you build is your space game. So I would love for you to show us the end product of what you built with AI. And we're going to work back into how you learned how to build that.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Sure. So we'll hop right back into sharing. And so I built this fun thing and you know, I've always, I've always enjoyed that kind of like flight simulators. And there was this moment in time in social recently where there's people popping up, building all of these like plane simulator apps. And I was like, man, I really want to fly in space. You know, I loved playing X-Wing back in the day. I love playing No Man's Sky. And I was like, I bet we could make something like this. So I started playing around with how could we do this? And so this is the game. This is a little game called Spaceflight and anyone can go and play this. It's on spaceflight.gg. And so you can go in, you can pick your name, you can pick the ship that you want to fly around as. You enter into the game and then you're in. And so this is all multiplayer too.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  And so that wasn't, it wasn't initially, but it has become multiplayer now over time. And you know, it started off as just kind of like a random idea of I could fly around space. How could I make the scene? And then how could I, how could I make this thing look like a ship? Well, what if I really want it to look like a ship instead? And so it kind of grew sort of out of control, but there was a lot of, a lot of fun that happened along the way to get there.

• 6:06Claire Vo?

  Okay. I joined the game as well. So it, proof is it is online and it's multiplayer, so I'm in it. Okay. So you built this game, which when I was growing up, all, the only reason I got into computers is because I wanted to make video games. But tell me, have you done game development before? Like this is very impressive.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  No, honestly, you know, I think I played games growing up a ton. I was, I was pretty intimidated by going and trying to, trying to build one out. And so I just, I played them. And so this was my first foray into trying to, trying to get something together that I could actually go and go and play and have other people play with me and see where it goes.

• 6:42Claire Vo?

  Okay. So how did you learn how to develop this space game? Which still totally blows my mind.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think we, we joke about the whole vibe coding thing, but this was, this was probably my first real experience in like truly vibe coding a thing, right? Like. And I jumped in and I was like, I want to, I want a flight simulator in space. And so it ended up producing this thing that had like the starry background, kind of like what you're seeing here. Uh, but ultimately had like a gray cube in the middle that was, that was supposed to represent a spaceship. And, and really it just ended up being this kind of back and forth asking of like, I want to change this part a little bit. I want the stars to move when I, when I go forward, I need to handle controls. And there was all these things that were like, that I didn't really think of before I started the project out as far as like, what is movement like in three dimensions in that case? Like, how do you handle that?

• 7:32Speaker 00

  How do you handle which way you want to move at any given moment? I had this idea then like, well, there's tons of 3D models out. So like, for example, I was on Sketchfab and I started looking at different, different spaceships. And I was like, well, these are all pretty cool. I imagine I could bring these in. And so I went in and asked, asked Cursor to, to go in and, and set these up. And I started reading more about what it was actually doing. And I think that's like, maybe a little bit of a different approach that I take is like, when these things, when it starts going and building this stuff out and I see like different technologies being used, I'll go in and I'll start asking it about how does this work? So like, as it started talking about GLTF models and GLB models, like how do these work? How are they actually brought into the game and start trying to learn a little bit about like what it's actually implementing so that I can use it, use it also.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  And so like, it set up the scene in 3JS. 3JS is a pretty well documented out platform overall. And so there's a lot of information out there. It built out the scene. I told it I wanted to replace that gray cube with the, with one of these models instead. And we went back and forth on that a bit because there's a lot of, there was a lot of nuance in making that happen, right? For example, like when you pull in these models, the game doesn't know what that model actually looks like. It's just a skin over, over a thing. And so figuring out how to like position it and how to give the game an idea of what forward actually is. Because some of these would load up sideways. And so I'd have to tell it, oh, the, the front of the ship is actually 90 degree turn to the left horizontally. Cause then I do 90 degree turn and it would just rotate at 90 degrees. And so you,

• 8:59Speaker 00

  it's a lot, it's like an interesting lesson in being really specific with the models and how, how you want them to behave and how you want to, um, have them like, act or how, how you want them to bring things out inside of the game. But then once you get it done once, you can say, hey, apply the same logic to my next ship. And like, I have a local version of it that's running that has, you know, five different ships in it that I just haven't put into the, into the real game yet. Uh, because like, it's really easy to prototype those out more and build more now.

• 9:27Claire Vo?

  So you, did you start this from scratch in Cursor? Like, walk us through how you really got from an idea to here? What tools did you use? Where were you doing that learning?

• 9:39Speaker 00

  You know what? Let's have some fun.

• 9:40Claire Vo?

  Yeah.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  Let's start building one a little bit.

• 9:43Claire Vo?

  Okay.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Let's just do it like-

• 9:44Claire Vo?

  We're gonna build a game now.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  We're gonna, we're gonna actually build one. We talked about doing this. Now we're actually going to do it.

• 9:49Claire Vo?

  Okay.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  So if I wanted to start this from scratch, I'm gonna go npm create and I'm gonna give it a different name. We'll just go, instead of flight, we're gonna go boop flight.

• 10:02Claire Vo?

  So you're starting a blank, basically React.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Yep, an empty React project.

• 10:07Claire Vo?

  Great.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  And so I'm gonna come in here and I'm gonna go into this boop flight project now. Oops, not boop flight. Boop flight.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  And now I'm in this project. Now, one of my favorite tools, it's kind of the up and comer right now. I know you love it too. We're gonna go right into Claude, but we're gonna live dangerously and we're gonna skip all permissions. So it's just gonna YOLO all of this into place and we're gonna see how it goes.

• 10:31Claire Vo?

  Great, so we're gonna speedrun vibe coding this game.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  We are going to speedrun. I'm gonna have it in it and what this is gonna do is it's gonna start bringing in that initial context of the project as part of like Claude's understanding. It's gonna create a claude.md file that's gonna make it understand what the project structure is, what application or what a framework it's using. So it's just good to like start off the project with like good understanding and good context around this. And like, I really did start from just an empty, an empty V project. And, you know, I think like, we're talking about games and we're talking about building games here, but the same thing translates really well to like when you're building actual applications too. A lot of times you're starting with this blank framework and you're giving it like a broad idea of the thing you wanna make. And then you're diving into these individual features.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  And so like, I built a lot of that inside of like real, like company level software. I took those same lessons into how I was building the game. Like, I had this broad idea and I just started working on the individual features of that idea and building it out. And so we have this broader, broader game here now or broader project overall. So let's say, uh, we're gonna do a flight simulator again, but we won't do space this time. What we'll do is, uh, I want to build a flight simulator. Game that uses three JS. Let's use polygon style art for the planes. WSD for movement. I want turning to bank the plane and arrow keys to control pitch.

• 11:58Claire Vo?

  Oh, look at you, kid raised on flight simulator.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Kid raised. Uh, let's see, let's, um, let's have it take off from a green field with trees and other objects around. We're going to be super vague. I have no idea if this is going to work out well, but we're going to see what happens. And really like this whole idea, I think people struggle a little bit with like the vibe coding thing, because a lot of times they give it far too big and too specific. I try to stay pretty wide and like, what's the broad strokes of what I want this thing to look like? Because I feel like that gives, that gives it all enough room to actually build something that works. And then I can tweak the individual parts as I go. And so like, in my head, I literally think through these chunks of the thing that I'm going to improve. And I just want to see like, what's the, the V zero prototype of this thing? That is the earliest version.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  And how do I start making progress on it? Again, the same thing translates to like the productivity apps. I built this like tracking application for like tasks around the house that I could share with, share with my spouse. And so like the same thing applied in there. I want an app that tracks everything I'm doing. I want to create subtasks off of that. Now I want to integrate, you know, super base for authentication. Now I want to have a backend, a backend database and like this gradual step of complexity over and over again. It has always been a much more approachable way for me to handle like building things out inside of these applications. But I see people pop in sometimes and they do these like very detailed project level plans that are like every single stage. And they feed it all into the context in one shot. And then they get frustrated when like the AI doesn't produce the perfect thing at the end of it.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  And it's like, well, you gave it a mountain of tasks that are hyper specific. Let's try to break it down a little bit.

• 13:38Claire Vo?

  So let me ask you a question because one thing I will say is you may not be a game developer, but you're clearly a developer in that you know what libraries to ask it to install. You know, some of these components, and I'm just curious, how are you learning for any one vibe coding project? What are the libraries that people are using? Like, what are your sources for figuring out how to scaffold with existing technologies?

• 14:05Speaker 00

  I stay fairly connected in like developer communities overall, but something else that I've started doing a lot more lately is like going and a lot of times I'll ask the AI for like the game one is a great example. If I wanted to build a game, I remember actually doing this. I went and I said, if I wanted to build a game and I wanted it to run inside of a browser, which technologies make the most sense? And like it'll go through and tell you like, in this case, it was like three JS is an option. When I did the multiplayer, that was another one that I did this on was I want to implement multiplayer inside of the game. What's the best route to do this? I think web sockets might be the right answer, but other alternatives and it and it said, you know, web sockets are are an easy one, but allow and allow for great customization, but also have the highest, the highest amount of work associated with them.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  Here's a couple of other open source libraries people use. It's like, that's one way to learn, but then picking those things out and starting to do deep dives on it, like even outside of the LLMs, just going in, you know, traditional Google of like, building scenes in three JS, how do people approach this and taking that and feeding that back into the LLM? So it almost becomes like a conversation with another developer where you're like, hey, I learned this thing from from the internet. How do you, can you implement this in the game? And like having it tell you if it's a good idea or not? A lot of times that's another thing I'll do is I'll ask the game or ask like the LLM, is this a good approach? Like I've implemented web sockets in this way because I wrote like the first part of web sockets myself, just because I've done a lot with web sockets in the past. And when, uh, when I got done with it, I went back and said, hey, can you look over this implementation and tell me if this is right?

• 15:31Speaker 00

  And it caught a few things where it's like, oh, you're having a race condition here. You're not optimized here. You're not disconnecting sessions appropriately here. And so I really do look at this as like another developer that I'm handing off tasks to, to see how they, how they end up going.

• 15:45Claire Vo?

  This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your co-pilot needs to see your entire code base. Your chat bot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch, it's a massive lift. That's where WorkOS comes in.

• 16:30Claire Vo?

  WorkOS gives you drop-in APIs for enterprise features, so your app can become enterprise-ready and scale up market faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor are already using WorkOS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at workos.com. Start building today. Okay, so where are we with this game? It looks like it wants to run.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  All right, so it looks like it finished up. It finished building. Everything's good. So now I just need to go and run it locally. We'll do that. And we'll launch it. And there's our game.

• 17:11Claire Vo?

  Now, shut up. Hold on. Hold your horses. You wrote like 27 words into this prompt, and now you have a video game?

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Now, there's a couple of things, though. Like, it looks great. This is fun. I feel much joy. But what we, I see on my side is, if you look, I'm banking to the right, so I'm pressing D, and it's turning opposite. Also, the tail is on the back end, so the camera is actually looking at the flight, at the, at the plane. So instead of being behind it, I'm on the front of it. Do you see what I mean?

• 17:46Claire Vo?

  I mean...

• 17:47Speaker 00

  This is a good example of going back in. We'll go back into here, and we'll tell it, it looks like my camera is facing the front of the model. Now, this might not work right, because like, the front is a, is more of a, of a human term in this case.

• 18:06Claire Vo?

  We say the nose of the plane. This is my liberal arts coming into play.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, the nose of the plane. We should be looking, should be fixed to the tail of the plane. Can we, I don't want to zoom out yet. I also feel like it's a little too close to be. We need a little bit more. We need a little bit more range here.

• 18:25Claire Vo?

  Look, it even gave you a little guide to the flight controls, and you didn't ask it to do that.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  So it's making changes. I love, I love that we can watch it actually happen here, what is actually updating. Claude Code is the ultimate like vibe coding tool, I swear. I definitely can tell that it's reversed, because when I go forward, the plane is flying at my screen as opposed to away from my screen. So it's definitely that the camera is totally reversed.

• 18:51Claire Vo?

  What I love about Claude Code is you can see your tokens go brrrr.

• 18:58Claire Vo?

  Really use up those token fees?

• 19:03Speaker 00

  I really need, I need this game to take off so I can make like just a hundred dollars a month for people. So I can pay for these tokens and not get yelled at for spending my household funds on AI every single month.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  So it looks like it's rotating the camera here. So we're getting a different look direction. It's making these updates. And so like, what I think is really interesting about this is this is all running now. Something else that I think is like a not so often used hack is I'll open up a new tab sometimes. And so in this case, I'm still in boot flight. I can make a directory for server. I can switch into server and I could say npm init. I can install Express in here. And so like, I could easily go back up a level now, open up a second Claude instance. And I can start instrumenting like the multiplayer stuff that we talked about. And so because I know just from the previous project that the web sockets works really well.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  I can say, I want to start implementing multiplayer for this game in the server directory. Handle player joins and give me a chat interface on the top right. That shows when people join the game.

• 20:17Claire Vo?

  So you have dueling Claude code going right now.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  I have two deaths.

• 20:22Claire Vo?

  On the front end, front end, uh, just setting up the framework, the visual framework and interactivity of the game. And then the backend, um, setting up multiplayer. Okay. Oh, we got a tail now.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  But now we're now see, but this is goes back to what I was talking about, like that things don't always work the way you expect it to do. So now instead of being slightly above, I'm slightly below. I'm, I'm still reversed. So when I go forward, I'm flying backwards. So visually we look right, but all of our controls are reversed now. And so in reality, what was going on is like, the camera was not mispositioned. The camera was right. It was that everything else was positioned wrong. So now we go back in and we tell it, all of my flight controls are reversed now. We should fix that. I also want the camera to be slightly above and behind the model.

• 21:15Claire Vo?

  Okay. And so let's check in on your multiplayer now that we're, uh, making some, some modifications. Okay. So it's, it's setting up some.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  It is setting up the game itself or setting up the multiplayer or the multiplayer stuff. Oh, we just dropped a whole bunch of stuff in. So we see the web sockets, right? So it's going in and saying like, when someone joins a message, what does chat look like? When the socket detects someone move, what does that look like? What does it look like when someone disconnects? So it's building out all of this stuff now. Uh, it's adding in the dependencies for socket. Our tokens just keep climbing. Things just keep going. And so we're still fixing things there. It's like, I really am having, look at that. Look at us.

• 21:58Claire Vo?

  Oh, it's so much better.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  And we have our, so our flight controls are a little wonky still. So we're still, we're still, we're banking right, but we're turning wrong. So that's a fix, but visually we're much better off than we were before.

• 22:14Claire Vo?

  It looks amazing.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  I know you want your kids to play it.

• 22:18Claire Vo?

  I, my kids are definitely, definitely going, going to play this. Okay. So let's, I think this is blowing my mind in terms of quality of gameplay. I know that you have higher standards for your game controls, but we can let that rest for a little bit.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 22:33Claire Vo?

  So now you're setting up multiplayer, which would be another aspect to this game, which I think would be very complicated to set up in prototype. Just taking a step back.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 22:45Claire Vo?

  How long do you think just writing this code would have taken?

• 22:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I, I think that like writing it completely from scratch is probably at least several hours to get to a good like baseline of what this is. And especially like without sitting down and drawing up like diagrams, starting to think through what all of that looks like. Just getting it to a point of, of being able to connect, have multiple players be able to connect, be able to see how they act inside of the game. Like there's a lot of architecture choices inside of there that you would make as you are building it. So I'm going to say at least, at least a few hours and we have at least a VZ or a prototype of it coming in, coming in pretty quickly right here in just a few minutes.

• 23:24Claire Vo?

  This is amazing.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  We now have a, we have a flight strip that it went and implemented. I didn't even tell it to implement these mountains. What is, what is all this? What is all this stuff in the distance going up? This is how Skynet starts, I'm telling you.

• 23:36Claire Vo?

  This is very, very cute. Okay, so before this turns into a Twitch stream of us just playing your very fun flight simulator later game, let's check in on multiplayer. Did you make this a real game?

• 23:50Speaker 00

  Well, we're gonna find out. So looking through, it's the run finished inside a, inside Claude code. So it made all the changes that we asked for, which really cool is like, it gives us some nice like documentation along the way of, of what's actually happening here. So I, I love that. We've got it up and running behind the scenes. So our, our game is, our game is up. The multiplayer screen's up. I'm seeing some joins, which are like the browser, I'm guessing the actual like Claude code browser session trying it out. So we, we have good signs. We have, we are suggesting that things look good. Let's jump in. It changed more. Look, there's mountains in the distance as it was correcting the other things.

• 24:26Claire Vo?

  Okay, so you joined, you're, you're there and then.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  Oh, and I see, I see multiple players. So now let's open up another tab. Maybe.

• 24:35Claire Vo?

  Oh, there's three players in the game now.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  You know, Claire is in the game. Now, we, I mean, obviously we have some things that are broken here, right? So like this should be down here on the bottom should be the top of the screen. It's like, oh, I can, I can mouse wheel scroll. This is a new feature.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  We're stuck in a.

• 24:51Claire Vo?

  Oh, and you have different camera views.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  It's a cock, it's like a cockpit view. So like, these are some of the problems though, right? Cause like, I didn't ask it to implement this. And so like, implement that anyways. But we are seeing Claire, we're seeing like, the chat, the chat went a little broken. So these are things that we have to fix, but ultimately like, think about how long it would have taken to learn how to build this from total scratch, implement all of this, set up the multiplayer, like, this would have taken several hours, if not days to go and do just for like a hacky fun prototype. And we did this in what, 15 minutes total? Like, we got long ways in a short period of time.

• 25:25Claire Vo?

  This is, this is amazing. Okay. If I know you, we're going to end this podcast and this is going to be your weekend project. You'll send it to me. And my kids can start playing, which they're already doing with the space game. So. I understand that we could iterate and fix some things. It seems like, you know, part of why I love this demo is you've shown us some of the frustrating moments of working with these LLMs to code, and it's not always perfect. You know, you take two steps forward, one step back. You add multiplayer, but you break the window. You add zoom, but you accidentally zoom through the airplane. And so I just think that's a really interesting process that nets out net positive. What do you think about that?

• 26:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I think one of the things that's worth calling out here is like, I talked earlier about the problem with people throwing too much plan at it, but I think that like, a little bit of plan is a good thing. And there's some rules, it's good guidelines around it are a good thing. But I feel like, again, the iteration is what really matters here and like, how far we were able to get in such like a short period of time. Like as far as like creating velocity and creating speed, I think that's like the really cool thing here is like, yeah, it wasn't perfect, but we got it doing the main things that we wanted it to pretty painlessly.

• 26:38Claire Vo?

  Okay, so let's do a quick lightning round and then get you back to your game development. So question one, how do you strike a balance between sort of this like fun exploratory stuff, building games, learning totally new technologies, and figuring out how to apply AI in your kind of professional day to day?

• 26:58Speaker 00

  You know, I think the thing about this is that it really isn't that much different from the workflow that I do as like day job stuff as far as like building, building software, trying things out, trying new things to hack out. I built a lot of repros off of, off of AIs, like when I work with customers and things like that. And so like, the skin might look different, one's a game and one is enterprise SaaS software, developer SaaS software. But also like the workflows end up matching a lot. And so I'm fortunate that the things that I enjoy doing are very similar in a way. But I think like, the answer is really like intentionality, right? Like, I started building the game because I wanted something fun to be able to show kids and show my kids, show your kids to play with, have people be able to go in and have fun with.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  It was different from building just another, another web app. And I have to like be really like conscious about choosing which one that I want to do. But the workflow matches up in a lot of the same ways, you know, they call taking a broad concept and breaking it down into the things I want to build inside of it and iterating on it. So it feels very similar, but it's just choosing what am I gonna, what am I actually gonna do? Am I building the fun thing or building the work thing? And they overlap sometimes.

• 28:04Claire Vo?

  And sometimes the fun thing is, as we showed, a little frustrating. So I'll wrap with my favorite question to ask, which is, when your vibe coding AI assistant is constantly breaking things, stuck in a loop, or adding features you did not ask it to add, what is your tactic for getting it to listen?

• 28:23Speaker 00

  I mean, I just scream at it, "Why are you this way?" No, I tend to ask it a lot of times, "Hey, can we start over? Can we start fresh?" If we get like far off the path, or far off of what I wanted to build, "We've been wrong for a while. Can we take a fresh look at this problem? Here are the main requirements," and I'll like list them out as like, "Here are the main requirements. Let's take a fresh look at implementing these." Sometimes I'll call out like complexity, like, "Hey, I feel like we've layered on a lot." Or I'll literally say, "We've layered on a lot of solutions. Can we simplify this in some way and start over?" I like to also like early on, set up like a good cursor rules file, or have like windsurf memories in place. Windsurf has its own rules files too, but like,

• 29:05Speaker 00

  I find that the windsurf memories work really, really well for this, and like, set big guidelines around really what I really wanted to focus on. But that doesn't necessarily help when it gets squirrely, to your point, off the beaten path. A lot of times, just being very clear with it, and very clear about, "Hey, let's start over. Let's reset this part." And also like, taking these bigger problems and scoping them down smaller. And so like, if we get way off the path, let's take that problem that's way off the path, and let's drill it down and say like, "I want the menu to be here." Like, the chat window and the other, and what we were showing a moment ago was way off the screen. I'm gonna go back in and I'm gonna say, "Hey, the part of the upper part of the game has moved to the bottom. The chat window's off. Can we fix those?" And I won't, I'll ignore everything else and just focus on that, to keep the context window focused. So just being intentional, talk and do it, giving it clear directions and clear expectations.

• 29:51Claire Vo?

  I hate to tell you this, my friend, but it sounds like you're a product manager.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  Oh, God.

• 29:59Claire Vo?

  Okay, Cody, this was so fun. I think you're going to inspire a bunch of people to build their own 3D multiplayer game in 15 minutes. I think we speed ran it. So where can we find you and how can we help you?

• 30:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm on X, so at Cody D Arkland, I'm on there often. I live digitally online, especially when building the games and stuff. As far as helping me goes, like, I get a lot of inspiration out from seeing other people tell these stories. And I think like, Going in and learning how to build something new. We're in this time period where everyone can go and do this. Everyone can, like, my kids have sat down and started playing with building games and things like that. And so the thing that would help me the most is just being excited about going in and building and like sharing the software you're building, the fun games you're building and sharing stories like that. There's not things going wrong, wrong in the world that like, being excited for this new world we're in where anyone can come in and build and build cool things is just really inspirational. I draw a lot from that. So share it with me, tag me in it. I'll hype it up. You'll hype it up. It'll be, it'll be a lot of fun.

• 30:59Claire Vo?

  Well, cheers to that. Thank you so much. This was really fun.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  All right. Thank you.

• 31:04Claire Vo?

  Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed the show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.