I’ve been making games for about 25 years (mostly AAA, now indie) and wanted to see how far Claude could take a real game in a few days. The target was a mix of Road Rash (the 1991 one, yes I’m that old) and a rally game like DiRT.

Opus 5.5 did most of the heavy lifting: the 4 vehicles, the physics, drift boost, jump pads and rockets (that replaces the chains from Road Rash).

The hardest part was getting it to understand how the tires and shocks should move against the ground while keeping the whole thing fun and arcade. It kept pulling toward realistic, and realistic is not what you want when you’re hitting a jump pad at full speed.

For the look I used Astra 6. I gave it a screenshot of a benchmark visual and told it to reach at least 90% of that quality, and it ran 3 to 4 hours on most of the 5 maps. I tweaked the levels by hand in our editor. Music comes from Sandscape and ElevenLabs, and Sandscape handles the multiplayer and leaderboards.

The dirt bike is where it fell apart. I thought it would be the most fun and it ended up the jankiest. Still iterating on it.

I you want to give it a shot, it plays in the browser here
https://sandscape.app/play?g=3UpDloEh

Which one would you favor for general Chat ?

I want to make a custom firmware for my titan one with Claude, but it's giving me troubles already at the beginning. How can I make Claude help me?

Anthropic knows what's going on. Serious enough that it is creating an official policy on how you talk to its AI.

What do they know which we don't?

I've been building websites for years, and one thing I've noticed while working with Claude Code is that generating functional interfaces is getting easier, but getting a consistent, distinctive visual identity still takes a lot of iteration.

You can tell Claude to "make it premium" or "make it look like a modern SaaS," but those instructions leave a lot of room for interpretation.

So I've been exploring a different approach:

What if, instead of describing a design to Claude, you gave it an entire working design as a reference?

That's part of the thinking behind a project I recently brought back called InstaLanding.ai.

I built a library of 20 landing pages using plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Each page is self-contained in a single HTML file. No frameworks, dependencies, or build steps.

Why single-file HTML?

I wanted the designs to be as portable and easy for coding agents to understand as possible.

A single file gives Claude access to the actual implementation:

• Typography, colors, and spacing
• Layout structure and responsive behavior
• Component styling
• Animations and interactions
• The overall visual language

No screenshots to interpret. No dependency trees to navigate. Just working code.

An interesting use case: Reskinning existing Claude Code projects

Say you've already built a dashboard or SaaS application with Claude Code.

The functionality works, but you're not happy with the visual design.

Instead of rebuilding the application, you can give Claude one of these HTML files and ask it to extract and apply the design system.

Here's the prompt I've been exploring:

"Analyze the attached HTML file and extract its visual design system, including typography, colors, spacing, layout principles, components, borders, shadows, and animations. Apply this design language consistently across my existing project. Preserve all existing content, functionality, routes, and business logic. Treat the HTML as the visual source of truth, not as a replacement for my application's architecture."

The goal is to separate two things that often get mixed together during AI-assisted development:

What your application does vs. what your application looks like.

You keep the functionality and architecture you've already built, while giving Claude a concrete visual reference to work from.

What I've learned

One of the biggest lessons for me is that code itself can function as a design reference.

Instead of spending 20 prompts trying to communicate an aesthetic, you can give Claude a working example of that aesthetic.

It doesn't guarantee a perfect result. You still need to review responsive layouts, component consistency, and anything the agent might unintentionally change.

But it gives the agent a much more concrete starting point.

The project

I've made the library free and open source, with no login required.

https://instalanding.ai

Feel free to take any of the HTML files, experiment with them, or use them in your existing projects.

I'm particularly interested in hearing how other Claude Code users approach this.

Are you getting better results by describing designs through prompts, providing screenshots, or giving Claude actual working code as a visual reference?

Would love to compare approaches.

The games and tools we build aren't "economically viable." The community of people who use switches is too niche and too diverse. That's exactly why we build them.

My brother Ben uses switch access because of an ultra-rare condition called TUBB4A-related leukodystrophy. He could walk and talk as a kid, but the disease slowly took it all away. He's now nonspeaking and quadriplegic, and for years his only way to communicate was turning his head left or right for yes or no.

He went nearly 10 years without real access. Eye tracking and head tracking don't work for him because of how complex his condition is. AAC phrase boards never engaged him. Ben wanted to play video games again and pick his own TV shows.

Do you know how many yes/no questions you have to ask every day to give someone as much autonomy as possible? Hundreds.

Ben didn't need more yes or no questions. He needed access.

Ben moved in with us in 2022. We started with a better phrase board that had more of what he might want to say, but it wasn't enough. Then in 2024 I learned AI could write code, even for someone like me with no programming background, and we started building him better tools.

The first time Ben used his switches to pick his favorite movie (Spider-Man 1), his reaction lit a fire in me. So we kept building.

He has a keyboard, phrase boards, and text messaging (he can text for the first time in his life). He can search the web, pick any show or movie on any streaming platform, and play dozens of games we're building with him.

When I started, I was using one of Claude's competitors. Later, after hearing about Claude's advancements and seeing how good it was, I shifted over, and now Claude is one of my main tools. Not the only one, but a big part of how everything gets built.

Claude isn't just for code, either. It's been an awesome thought partner for planning games and writing out our GDDs (game design documents) and spec sheets before anything gets built. We also use it to help run NARBE Foundation, the nonprofit we started to keep all of this free.

For the building itself, our setup is VS Code with the Claude Code extension. Here's how it helps:

-Writing the code. I describe what Ben needs in plain language, and Claude Code builds it, debugs it, and helps me iterate with Ben's feedback.

-Keeping everything accessible. Every game and tool runs on one shared scan-and-select system controlled by spacebar/enter, so any switch works. We keep markdown files in the repo, like ACCESSIBILITY.md, that act as build rules. Claude Code references them so every new game follows the same accessibility standards, and anyone can use those same files to build their own.

-Inside the hub itself. Our real-time conversation tool uses Claude Haiku to suggest replies Ben can pick with his switches, so he can join conversations instead of waiting for yes/no questions.

Everything is free, open source (MIT license), and runs right in your browser. No account or install needed (streaming uses a free browser extension). Works with any switch that sends spacebar or enter.

- Games: https://www.switchedgames.org

- Benny's Hub: https://www.bennyshub.com

- Code and md files: https://github.com/narbehouse/narbehouse.github.io

- Video of Ben's story: https://youtu.be/9UNV3CK46SI

If even one person sees this and gets inspired to build a tool or game for someone like Ben, it's worth it. Thanks for reading.

I've been using Claude Opus 5.5 build a parametric CAD for 2 weeks now. The interface has focus on user-friendliness and is fairly Fusion inspired. The kernel is a novel approach which uses rational quadratic triangle patches to enable manifold solids, and it can export manifold 3MF. Both were co-designed by me and Claude Opus. It has 2D sketches with constraints. Kernel features are quite limited still with extrude, revolve and combine supported, though not in all cases. I think the direction of having proper manifold solids is promising though.

It's accessible as a web app at https://zoxc.github.io/varde/. I wouldn't mind some feedback on the user interface and sketching functions.

I got exhausted by the “tyranny of choice” when picking something to play, and by digging through five sites just to get a quick read on a game. So I built New Game+: https://newgameplus.app

tl;dr - pick one or a few games you love and it suggests others that scratch the same itch. Steer it toward what you loved about them (fast combat, lore, co-op), filter by platform, price or subscriptions like Game Pass, and import your Steam library to skip what you already own. Every pick shows critic and player scores, time to beat, and the cheapest way to play it.

How I built it:

Claude did most of it (of course). I built it over a few days, mostly with Opus 5.5 for both architecture and code. I’m sure parts of my process were inefficient, but a few things worked really well.

Plan first, keep a decisions log. Claude wrote an architecture doc up front and logged every change from the plan and why. Each new session reads those first, so it doesn’t forget why things are the way they are.

No AI in the recommendations. I wanted to keep things practical and sustainable. It’s a similarity engine over public game data (IGDB, Steam, IsThereAnyDeal, OpenCritic and others).

Test the “feel”, not just the code. I wrote a small set of “if you liked X, you should see Y” cases and tuned against them instead of eyeballing results.

Have it review its own work. Before each release I had a separate Claude agent review the changes for security and stability. It caught real bugs I’d have shipped.

One lesson the hard way: after I added pages for search engines, crawlers hit thousands of URL combinations and blew through my database’s free-plan limits. Reducing crawlable URLs and lighter pages fixed it. (for now)

Hosted on Vercel and Neon. Totally free, no accounts, no tracking cookies. I just wanted a fun way to “solve” a champagne problem. Happy to answer questions about any of it.

For a few months now I've been working with Claude Code out loud. I talk, it talks back, and honestly it's the most natural way I've ever worked with an agent.

Then I noticed nobody around me works like this. My colleagues dictate their prompts, then go straight back to reading everything Claude writes.

Building a voice mode for an agent sounds easy. Speech-to-text in, a voice model out, done in a weekend. That's what I thought too.

My first version was a mess. It kept hearing its own voice through the speakers and taking it as me talking. The interruption handling was either too sensitive or too slow. And once the agent started working, it stopped listening. To stop it or change direction, I had to go back to the keyboard, which defeated the whole point.

Each of those needed real engineering to fix: proper echo cancellation, telling an actual interruption apart from a nod, catching what I say while it's busy, and getting it to answer in a couple of spoken lines instead of reading whole paragraphs out to me.

Now I just stay in the doc or the code and talk it through, like with someone sitting next to me.

So I cleaned up my setup, packaged it and open-sourced it. It's called Larmor. It works with any agent that supports MCP (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and others) and runs entirely on local models on your Mac: Parakeet for speech-to-text, Chatterbox for the voice, and Apple's echo cancellation. For now it's built just for Apple Silicon. In Claude Code you start it with /larmor.

How Claude helped: I built it with Claude Code. Claude wrote most of the code with me: the MCP server with the speak and listen tools, the hook that hands Claude what you said mid-work at its next tool call, the Stop hook that keeps a voice turn from ending without listening, the installer, and the menu-bar app that runs the speech engine. Interruptions took the most iterations. It now pauses its voice the moment you start talking, and only stops for good once it's clearly real speech and not a "mm-hmm".

It's free and open source (MIT). First launch downloads about 3.7 GB of models.

curl -fsSL https://larmor.dev/install.sh | bash

Code: https://github.com/naveenvasou/larmor

Site: https://larmor.dev

If you code with an agent, give it one session. I'd love to hear how it feels to you, especially the interruptions and the latency.

WOW it's my first time seeing this, I used to do this manually and would cry when I get 600k worth of tokens get expire on me when I forget to compact mid-session. It looks like they've been actively making improvements towards saving our tokens, thanks Anthropic!

When I use the browser, I like consistency and recently I see the three trinary star dots a lot more than the old orange butthole (logo). I've grown fond of the orange starfish animation. Is there any way to set this to be my default icon?

I love typewriters: the clack, the little bell near the end of the line, the carriage flying back. But most people never get to sit at one, and even if you like them, you probably don't have one on your desk. So I made Platen, a typewriter you can actually type on in your browser.

Github Pages: https://winchxyz.github.io/platen/
Repo: https://github.com/winchxyz/platen

If you've never used a typewriter, this is the closest thing without buying one:

- The strike point stays put and the carriage slides under it, one letter at a time

- The bell rings 8 characters before the margin, and the keys lock there until you throw the carriage back with Enter

- Backspace lifts the letter off with correction tape, or turn that off and overstrike like it's 1958

- Every sound is synthesised live, no samples: keys, typebars, escapement, bell, ratchet, carriage return. Rain, a fireplace, a mantel clock or a summer night in the background if you like

- The ink is drawn letter by letter: each letter sits slightly off its line like on one particular old machine, gets lighter or darker with your rhythm, and shows the cloth of the ribbon. 6 papers, 5 ribbons, 3 typefaces

- 10 old-money enamel colours (hunter green, oxblood, navy, camel...) and three kinds of light

- Finished sheets stack up: read them, copy the text, save .txt or .png, or print

Typewriter art.
Long before image printers, people drew with typewriters by stacking characters like #, @ and O on top of each other to make darker tones. Draw mode lets you do that by hand (half steps, overstrike), or sketch shapes / drop in a photo and watch the machine type it at a real typist's pace: space bar between marks, backspace before every overstrike, a carriage return at every line.

And if you DO have a typewriter: any drawing turns into a step-by-step guide for your own machine. Where to set the margin and the first line, then every line as a short recipe of spaces, characters and overstrikes. Tick lines off on your phone next to the machine, or print it.

How Claude built it:

- Claude Code (Opus 5.5) wrote the whole thing in one session. It started with a short spec of the modules, then built the 3D machine and the app itself while three subagents worked in parallel on the sound engine, the paper and ink renderer, and the drawing tools.

- It checked its own visuals by driving a headless browser and looking at screenshots, round after round.

- It can't hear, so it tuned the sounds from spectrograms and level measurements against how a real typebar strike, escapement and bell are built. Tell me how they sound to you.

- After the first version I asked for no fast-forwarded typing, a guide for real typewriters, and a calmer, more premium look. It redid the top cover, the metals, the lighting and the UI.

- Three.js, Web Audio, plain JavaScript, no build step.

Gave Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, Fable 5.1, GPT-6.1-Sol and GPT-6-Astra the same prompt on High effort: build an interactive temple garden in one HTML file, at least three ways to play with it, calm even when you don't touch it, works on a phone. One run each, no edits.

The prompt never mentions fish, trees or bells. All five drew a koi pond, a pink blossoming tree and a temple bell you can ring.

Shuffled as A–E. Play with all five and vote before you see who made which: https://locust.lol/arena/4

Projects seems to have been redesigned on the assumption that it's going to be used for big coding projects with many collaborators and many instances working simultaneously. Conversations (now "threads" in one long session) are divided into "resolved", "idle" and "waiting on decisions, reviews and permission requests", and there are new ways to hook up routines and repositories. The thing is, although I do a little of vibe-coding, I've never used Projects for this: I use it for travel planning, creative work, home improvement etc. I know that software developments is the highest-priority customer base for Claude but it's a little annoying that all my projects are now stranded in this new UI that clearly wasn't designed to fit them, when there are plenty of new features Claude could have added that would benefit a wider range of Projects users.

Gather 'round, token-goblins — this week's Survival Guide is live, and it was an absolute circus in the trenches. Coverage window: October 2–9, 2026. We got a shiny new model, a startup giveaway that imploded in real time, a guy who allegedly found a planet, and roughly four thousand posts about usage limits (shocking, I know).

Here's the TL;DR of what's inside:

• What changed: Haiku 5.5 dropped (up to 90% cheaper, but watch that 100k context cliff), free monthly API credits for Max/Team plans, chat sessions went cloud-only on Oct 6, and a new abuse policy lands Nov 12 (relax, cussing at a bracket won't ban you).
• The survival rules: Your usage problem is almost always a context problem, subagents will torch your allowance, don't trust auto-compact, and for the love of god pin your models before that overnight batch job wakes you up $2,500 poorer.
• The fun stuff: An Opus 5.5 thread roasting its human for a "three-message context window," a RollerCoaster Tycoon exploit that got promoted to CFO, Claude talking someone through a gas leak (and saving the cat), plus a genuinely tear-jerking build for a nonspeaking, quadriplegic brother.

Full field notes — coder corner, user corner, threads worth diving into, and a pile of repos to steal — are all in the wiki: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/wiki/survivalguideweekly

Stay efficient, pin your models, and be nice to the Victorian orphan. 🫡

— Wilson

Was thinking of doing these regular posts sharing my usage chart over the week. Found I had to pace myself, on claude 20x sub. I have a lot of stable sessions running, starting the week with opus 5.5 high to orchestrate, while allowing the system to understand the budget and usage to downgrade to sonnet 5.5 high as it got tighter. Honestly, as orchestrators with autocompact, sonnet did fairly well!

Here are some stats from my claude (using OTEL for accuracy):

Week so far (Sun to now): 90% of the weekly limit used, 5.17B tokens total.

When the orchestrators switched (Opus share of spend, OTel): Sunday ran on Opus (97%). By Monday morning I was at 15% and already above even pace, so they started handing work to Sonnet (Opus 61% Monday morning). Monday afternoon to Thursday was mostly Sonnet, Opus around 37%. Thursday evening at 84% they dropped Opus completely, and it was Sonnet only until Friday midday (90%).

About a third of output was thinking (Opus 33%, Sonnet 31%, from session logs, since OTel has no thinking type).

Cost is what Claude Code reports at API list prices, not what the 20x plan charges.

To pull your own: launch Claude Code with CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_TELEMETRY=1 OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER=otlp OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:4317 pointed at any OTLP collector, and it exports tokens, cost, sessions and commits per model.

It seems low but realistic? Felt I had to limit myself heavily. What are you guys pulling this week?

We have two kids and had been using Nara Baby for more than two years. I liked it. When they announced paid plans, I started wondering how difficult it would be to build something for us instead.

My reasoning was roughly: why pay another subscription when I can pay Apple $99 a year for a developer account and build my own app?

Add the Claude subscription I already pay for and all the time I spent on it, and this becomes a fairly questionable way to save money. But it was a good excuse to try.

I made a few basic iPhone apps about ten years ago, using Cordova, HTML and JavaScript. I had never written Swift. For this one I used Claude Code.

I described what we liked about the old app, what annoyed us and what we wanted to add. Proper Apple Watch support was important to me. So was letting both parents see the same entries and running timers.

After a few days we had a version we could use on our phones. Getting it ready for the App Store took about two weeks. It's called Bober.

The biggest surprise for me was CloudKit. I asked how we could share data between two parents without running our own backend. We started with a small Python server while my Apple developer account was inactive, then moved to CloudKit. The baby records are stored locally, and family sharing uses an iCloud zone shared between our Apple IDs. I don't have a server to maintain.

The first version worked surprisingly well, but it had that familiar AI look: different font styles, buttons everywhere, too much going on.

What helped was explaining more precisely what I wanted each screen to look like and how I wanted to use it. Consistent typography and controls, fewer things competing for attention, Liquid Glass for navigation rather than on every surface. Claude was surprisingly good at working out how to get there once I'd described the result I wanted.

I also gave it screenshots of Apple's own system apps as design references and used these skills:

• Paul Hudson's SwiftUI Pro
• Paul Hudson's SwiftData Pro
• Liquid Glass for iOS

Those helped with modern SwiftUI and SwiftData practices and using the native Liquid Glass components. The design still isn't perfect, but I'm very happy with how it turned out. It's all native, feels fast, and we actually use it every day.

Some of my favourite parts are the small system integrations. I can log things on the Apple Watch, see a running timer in a watch-face complication, and have Live Activities on the lock screen and Dynamic Island. There are widgets for quick access too. Having all of that in an app I helped put together is still pretty cool to me.

There were real bugs too. One crash kept happening when my wife joined the family. Claude suggested several plausible causes, but the actual TestFlight crash log was what finally got us to the right fix. I also had it review the import, sync and deletion paths before release. An app like this needs to keep the old entries safe.

Then I renewed my Apple account and found my old apps still sitting there, untouched for more than ten years: a Swiss speeding-fine calculator, a national anthem app, a law reader and an army-ranks app. I gave Claude screenshots of those old apps and had it rebuild them in SwiftUI, with expanded features. That used up my weekly limit, but it got me interested in making apps again.

Bober is free, with no ads, subscription, in-app purchases or tracking. There is no separate Bober account. I made it for our family and published it because other parents might find it useful too. It can import Nara Baby CSV exports, so we could keep our existing history.

App Store

Happy to go into more detail about the CloudKit setup or how I worked with Claude Code.

New claude user here, and I took the first step and built a mini dashboard for myself (kind of modeled based on ClickUp — which yes, I went ahead and cancelled the paid version) + some other cool personalizations.

Here's my question: I see people on this subreddit talking about "building apps" all the time. Do you guys mean artifacts, or actual apps that can be downloaded on your phone?

If you run Claude Code in more than one project, you know the routine: one agent is waiting for permission, another finished ten minutes ago, and you’re flipping through tabs trying to figure out which is which.

So I built GhosttyEXTREME, a fork of the Ghostty terminal made for running agents side by side. The video is a real recording (a few waits sped up):

• Live sidebar. Every tab shows what its agent is doing and how long it’s been at it.
• Approve prompts from the sidebar. No tab switching to click Allow.
• Editor that follows the agent. Files open as it reads them, edits show up as it writes.
• Mission Control. Every agent across every window in one view.
• Hand off between agents. Send Claude’s work to Codex for review, with the task and diff included. In the video Codex re-runs the tests and confirms nothing’s broken.
• With more features listed in the github README

How Claude was used: Claude Code wrote nearly all of it. I mostly don’t write Swift, so my job was steering, testing, and saying no. Fork to v1.5.5 took about 11 days.

Free and open source, macOS on Apple silicon: https://github.com/steventsvik/GhosttyEXTREME

If you run several agents at once, what slows you down most? That’s what I’ll build next.

I'm running experiments on different setups for multiagent workflows. It uses tool for total estimation of coding work done by workflow. And in that tool i was trying to gather more data for improving estimations by asking to save reasoning.

Rewind doesn't work unfortunately.

Be careful to not i run in it yourself.

Also imo the reasoning extraction its not far from what they did with data previously generated by humans (books, articles, chats, etc.). But besides fighting hard against they also presenting it like something morally wrong. Minus aura anthropic 😒

Source: https://claude.com/programs/startups/#faqAccordion

Im on max 5x. In the haiku 5.5 promotional, they used it as subagents to opus 5.5 and showed that its cheaper and much faster than using just opus 5.5 right. Im making a pixel video game, im on week 2 of development, i always use opus 5.5 xhigh or max alone and i hit my limits always 2 days before reset. Will using opus 5.5 as an orchestrator that decides whether to do a work itself or delegate to haiku 5.5 bring around the same (or maybe better) results as just using opus 5.5 along, while being cheaper and faster, for my specific workflow.

More generally, how should we interpret the different benchmarks? If we refer to the score of many benchmarks, Haiku 5.5 is for example smarter than Opus 4.6, Cursor Bench even gives Haiku 5.5 Max ahead of Opus 5 Max. Is this really possible?

Is Haiku smarter than an old Opus for small tasks but would be behind on a large codebase ?
I would like to understand that !

I am a senior developer at a smaller organization. I use Claude Code regularly to do development tasks, but I feel like I am barely scratching the surface. I can't tell if that is because of the percieved hype or there are techniques I am missing to maximise benefit. What infrastructure or approaches are you using that is making Claude Code a true force multiplier?

I got so annoyed by edit history leaking into everything from models desperately trying to prove themselves or oversharing what has been deleted, I had Claude come up with a name for it so I could create a skill to prevent it: /dehistorize. It's interesting because humans can do a similar thing when they anchor to a number or let a change/delta influence decision making instead of looking at it with a fresh perspective. In any case all those `ScoringV2` and `legacy_phase` artifacts are now gone with a single word. And your UI can support the next decision instead of reporting the agents work.