The author says Claude Opus 5.5 built a 3D browser game for picksandshovels.org on the afternoon of October 11, 2026, after receiving one detailed prompt. The prompt asked for a visually polished and addictive game about the AI industry, with a gold-rush theme and a light undertone of civilization-ending catastrophe. It proposed mechanics and incidents involving self-driving cars, lab escapes, hacking, currency manipulation, wet-lab accidents, model misalignment, and open-weight labs, including tracking token burn and model capabilities. The author says he added some commentary while Claude worked, but that most of the jokes and disasters came from the model. The project was to be built in a public GitHub repository and deployed through GitHub Pages, with possible outcomes including societal collapse, death from dysentery, and image-based sharing.
