Postscript: Idle Frontier and on developing games with AI

Can you bootstrap your way from annotating data to training a frontier model in one thousand days? Play Idle Frontier! In this blog post, I want to share my experience developing this game with the aid of Opus 5 (which I’ll just call Claude from now on). My goal is to give a tempered perspective on AI-aided game development: something in between those zero-shot-three-js games that are popular recently and the no-AI-in-my-workflow crowd. Note that I’m just a hobbyist game developer. I learned pixel art and Godot and made four games before, but nothing too fancy. But first, how did this game come to be? The Idea One of my projects during the first term of my PhD was a literature review of language model development in the context of data and compute constraints.1 Language models require a lot of these resources; this has been formalized into a set of scaling laws by Kaplan et al. (2020) and Hoffmann et al. (2022). However, how do you build language models in environments where these…