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Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

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Re: Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

#41

Post by hu3 »

chimpanzee2 wrote: post #36

This may sound like an insane take, but idc: I swear people (esp here on HN) are actually blind to the weaknesses of Gemini. I must be among the handful of people who know how thoroughly lobotomized any AI agent from Google must be given their extremely radical historical and contemporaneous practices of censorship.

I suspect those who praise Gemini use it mostly for JS/CSS/HTML because that's where it shines for me.

For complex code I have been having using Sonnet/Opus as usual with a mix of GPT5.3-Codex.

Re: Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

#42

Post by hu3 »

paganel wrote: post #22
LatencyKills wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This technology exists. It isn’t just a toy. I think it is amazing to see people use it for interesting things even if it isn’t groundbreaking. I’ve been an engineer for almost 40 years and love seeing what Claude Code can do. Like it or not, young people will not know a world where this technology doesn’t exist. It is just part of their toolset now.

> I’ve been an engineer for almost 40 years and love seeing what Claude Code can do. You would say that because otherwise you'd be afraid as being seen as "too old for this job", and hence risking getting kicked out of it all, meaning no future employment opportunities. I know that feeling, because I myself have been doing this programming job for 20+ years already (so not a young one by any means), but let's just cu…

Really? That's a lot of presumption and reductionism to LLMs enthusiasts.

People of varied ages, already leverage LLMs on a daily basis. And LLMs will only get better.

Yesterday, Opus did work for me that would have taken me weeks. And the result was verified with a comprehensive suite of unit tests plus smoke tests by myself. The code looks exactly as the rest of the code in the 10y+ old, hand-written, enterprise project, no slop.

And you actually should be afraid of being left behind in dev related fields if you don't use LLMs. In most areas in fact.

Once the market corrects for LLM assisted production, the expectations will raise. So right now there is a small window to leverage LLMs as a time saving advantage before it becomes the norm and everyone is forced to use it because expecttions will reflect that.

Re: Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

#43

Post by hu3 »

dakolli wrote: post #20
p-e-w wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I guess the tens of thousands of PhDs who are working on LLMs full time are just collectively wasting their lives. Everyone except you is simply too dumb to see it.

10s of thousands of PhDs working on llms lol...

With the amount of money being thrown in R&D, I don't doubt the actual number is astounding.

Re: Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

#44

Post by giancarlostoro »

Reminds me of Screeps, which I never took the time to fully play, but now I'm wondering if using Claude Code to play Screeps is cheating. Additionally, Screeps lets you host your own backend... What if we started benchmarking coding LLMs with Screeps?... Oh God... If anyone wants to do this let me know, I don't want to burn money on every LLM out there... I'll throw in my Claude Subscription into the contest...

Edit: Actually the repo README indeed says its inspired by Screeps. I don't know why they didn't just build on top of Screeps, maybe the idea is to have something anyone can pick up off the shelf for free?

Re: Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

#46

Post by jack6e »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #44

Reminds me of Screeps, which I never took the time to fully play, but now I'm wondering if using Claude Code to play Screeps is cheating. Additionally, Screeps lets you host your own backend... What if we started benchmarking coding LLMs with Screeps?... Oh God... If anyone wants to do this let me know, I don't want to burn money on every LLM out there... I'll throw in my Claude Subscription into the contest... Edit:…

Perhaps it reminds you of Screeps because of what the author wrote in the third paragraph of the submission.

Re: Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

#47

Post by __cayenne__ »

degenerate wrote: post #39
david3289 wrote: post #31

This is a really interesting direction. RTS games are a much better testbed for agent capability than most static benchmarks because they combine partial observability, long-term planning, resource management, and real-time adaptation. It reminds me a bit of OpenAI Five — not just because it played a complex game, but because the real value wasn’t “AI plays Dota,” it was observing how coordination, strategy formation…

You would likely be interested in the Starcraft BWAPI: https://www.starcraftai.com You can watch the matche videos from training runs: https://www.youtube.com/@Sscaitournament/videos I don't think BWAPI has ever integrated modern AI models, but I haven't followed its progress in several years.

funny you mention this… I have a new project that is going in this direction

Re: Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

#49

Post by chasd00 »

dmos62 wrote: post #34

I'd love to see text-only spatial reasoning. As in, the LLM is presented some kind of textual projection of what's happening in 2d/3d space and makes decisions about what to do in that space based on that. It kind of works when a writer is describing something in a book, for example, but not sure how that could generalize.

believe it or not my 8th grade son was given a US History homework assignment to play Oregon Trail. I was very amused watching him "do his homework". I wonder how an LLM would fare in that game since it's mostly a text choose-your-adventure type interface.

Re: Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

#50

Post by infecto »

embedding-shape wrote: post #6
wongarsu wrote: post #5

I know visualization is far from the most important goal here, but it really gets me how there's fairly elaborately rendered terrain, and then the units are just unnamed roombas with hard to read status indicators that have no intuitive meaning. Even in the match viewer I have no clue what's going on, there is no overlay or tooltip when you hover or click units either. There is a unit list that tries (and mostly fail…

Yeah, it's all what you get when you basically ask an agent "Build X" without any constraints about how the UI and UX actually should work, and since the agents have about 0 expertise when it comes to "How would a human perceive and use this?", you end up with UIs that don't make much sense for humans unless you strictly steer them with what you know.

Or maybe the simple answer is it looks exactly like the referenced game screeps. Probably a better explanation than hand waving away the faults of an agent.
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