How a Creature Learns to Play With a Ball

I've built an artificial-life game: a browser world where creatures have simulated brains and bodies. They get hungry, sleep, breed, form relationships, and — most importantly — they learn. Very little of what they do is scripted. Most of it they work out for themselves. This is a close look at one behaviour, because it's the one I'm most sure is genuinely learned: a creature playing with a ball. Nothing tells a newborn to do this. There's no gene for it, no script, no instinct that says "when

How Do You Test Code That's Different Every Time? I Added RAG to My Game and Had to Find Out

My game's in-chat help used to be a vending machine. The assistant had a gameHelp tool with seven hand-curated topics — gaze, breeding, gadgets, a few others — and if a player asked about something I hadn't thought to write up, it had nothing. Every new mechanic meant another hand-authored answer, and the help was only ever as complete as my patience. I wanted to replace that fixed list with retrieval over the project's actual design docs — about two dozen markdown files covering brain mechanic

Letting an LLM Drive a Live Web App — Safely

Building a chat feature is easy now. A text box, the Vercel AI SDK, a model behind it — a weekend, maybe less. The hard part isn't the chat. It's letting the model do things to your actual application without it becoming a liability. My artificial-life game has an in-browser assistant you can talk to. It isn't a help bot bolted on the side. It reads live game state and reaches into the running simulation: you can ask it about the world and it answers from actual state, and you can ask it to des

I Asked Claude to Rebuild a 1996 Game. It Didn't Stop There

I've been a senior full-stack engineer for 17 years. I don't know machine learning or biology, but I do know how to keep complex systems from collapsing under their own weight. I remember playing Creatures in 1996 — a game where you raised digital beings with neural networks for brains and biochemistry for emotions. Even as a kid I knew it was doing something other games weren't. Last year I wondered: could Claude rebuild it? If it could, I'd handle the architecture and let Claude handle the sc

How I Let an AI Agent Ship Code Overnight Without Waking Up to a Security Incident

I gave an AI agent root inside a container so it could ship code overnight while I put my kids to bed. Then I almost gave it an escape hatch I didn't see. This is about two things I built: an autonomous orchestrator that ships code unsupervised, and the security work that makes me trust it overnight. The codebase it builds is a complex artificial life simulator — that's a story for another post. TL;DR * I built an autonomous coding agent that ships GitLab MRs while I'm putting my kids to bed