CTRL+VIBE
INSERT COIN

The making of ctrlvibe.dev Updated Oct 23, 2026

Built by AI agents. Directed by me.

Starts the arcade’s own soundtrack · or just scroll

PLAYER 1 · READY

You’re standing in it.

Ctrl+Vibe Arcade is a walk-in voxel arcade with nine games you can play. I don’t write code. AI agents built the room and every game, while I set the direction, often by voice, reviewed the work and decided what went live. One prompt made the first playable arcade in 2 hours 20 minutes.

Twenty-eight days in, this is the story so far, told from inside the arcade itself. Everything behind this panel is the real room, drawn live by its own engine. Scroll, and the camera walks you to where each part of it happened.

STAGE 0 · BY THE NUMBERS

28 days, counted from the agents’ own logs.

From Sept 25, the day Lanternbound, Hopscape and the arcade were built, through Oct 22. Claude Code and Codex keep a log of what each agent reads and writes; these totals add them up. They cover the Claude and Codex work of those days: the arcade and its games, the city lots, the egg hunt, the channel, and experiments that aren’t public yet. Grok and Gemini aren’t counted.

35.8billion tokensread and written by AI agents: Claude 28.5B, Codex 7.2B
$18,295at API pricesI never paid per token. This is the same work priced at the public list rates.
4,509promptsthat started agent work, many of them dictated by voice
81live releasesof this website, by Cloudflare’s own deployment records
1,031agent-hoursof work, packed into 330 hours on the clock
16agents at onceworking in the same minute, at the busiest moment
2h 20mto the first arcadeone prompt to Claude Opus 5.5, on the evening of Sept 25
46times sent backby an independent AI critic, in 87 recorded review rounds (Sept 25 to Oct 15)

Counted from the logs on my PC. How I counted

STAGE 0 · DAY BY DAY

The build had a heartbeat.

Each bar is one day of tokens: Claude in teal, Codex in pink. Dots are live releases. Hover or tap a day, or use the arrow keys, to see what happened.

The busiest day was Oct 1: real 3D worlds went in outside every window.

Who did the work tokens, Sept 25 to Oct 22

  • Claude Opus 5.523.9B · 67%
  • GPT-6 Astra5.3B · 15%
  • Claude Sonnet 5.53.0B · 8%
  • Claude Fable 5.11.6B · 4%
  • GPT-6.1 Sol1.3B · 4%
  • Smaller helpers0.7B · 2%

Grok and Gemini also worked on the project, but they aren’t counted. Each model’s tokens are its total across all of its work in these days, not only the role it plays in this story.

The jukebox behind this chart plays songs made in code. Insert a coin to hear them.

LEVEL 1

Before the arcade

Prologue · Sept 21 – 24

A control room for agents

I set up a desktop workspace for AI agents, built on an open-source template, and the agents have been building it ever since. Every agent gets its own tab, its own folder and one job. It started with four tabs. By Oct 15 it held 116.

55 Claude50 Codex7 Grok2 Gemini2 terminal

· 2:00 PM

Twenty-seven minutes to a game

First prompt at 2:00 pm, a playable game at 2:27: Pulse Wing, a one-button flight through a neon night. Claude Opus 5.5 grew it over the next three days, from 1,087 lines that afternoon to 9,465, with 14 worlds and 27 birds. I went through 14 bird redesigns one by one.

All 27 Pulse Wing birds in a grid, from a sparrow and a toucan to a phoenix and a black-hole bird, each with its price.

Claude Opus 5.5

Ctrl+Vibe goes public

The name, and @ctrlvibedev on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X. The first video went out that evening, and the workspace learned to take dictation. From then on I often talked to the agents instead of typing.

My publishing queue logged 261 posts across the four, with something new every day from Sept 23 to Oct 15. No face on camera: the narration is an AI voice, and it says so. The channel window you see here is a real one, onto the world outside.

Watch the builds

LEVEL 2

One prompt each

Act I · Sept 25 – 26

· MORNING

Lanternbound

A survivor game from one pasted prompt: 2 hours 52 minutes and 815 replies, every one of them from Claude Opus 5.5. It has had 28 waves of visual polish since.

Lanternbound at night: a lantern-bearer surrounded by skeletons in a dark meadow, level 18, two minutes fifty-seven in.

Claude Opus 5.5

· AFTERNOON

Hopscape, and a rule

Hopscape took one 3,594-character prompt and about 1 hour 55 minutes. Earlier that afternoon two different AIs, Claude and Grok, had ended up editing the same folder for a card-game experiment. I stopped it and made the rule that still holds: one agent, one folder, one tab.

Hopscape: a little voxel critter hopping across roads with buses and cars, grass and a river.

Claude Opus 5.5

· 7:58 PM

One prompt, one arcade

Claude Opus 5.5 built the whole arcade from scratch in 2 hours 20 minutes. It wrote a tiny WebGL renderer instead of using a 3D library, built the room from 10 cm voxels with about 60 lights baked in at load, and gave each game its own cabinet. A robot tester played and exited all four games installed by then, on desktop and phone sizes, before the room even existed. The first independent review failed it with 11 findings; the second passed. It was live at 10:44 pm.

That renderer is the one drawing this page.

The day-one lounge: a grey couch against a purple wall and a night window.
The lounge on day one.

Claude Opus 5.5Independent reviewer

· OVERNIGHT

HOLLOWSTAR

A twin-stick roguelike about a lantern-bot relighting a fallen star, built overnight from one prompt in 5 hours 39 minutes: six worlds, 16 bosses and more than 130 items.

HOLLOWSTAR: a small glowing robot in a dark foundry room with crates and enemies.

Claude Opus 5.5

LEVEL 3

Four days of rounds

Act II · Sept 26 – 29

My first “no” on the live site

That morning Claude Fable 5.1 gave the room its first polish. Then Codex, on GPT-6 Astra, took over as the arcade’s developer and redesigned the phone-landscape layout; it changed every game’s interface, so I asked for it back, and it was rolled back about twenty minutes after it went live. I picked a reference image and approved a new layout with one change: a black couch instead of rust.

That black couch is the one in front of you.

Claude Fable 5.1Codex · GPT-6 Astra

A nook, a cat, and an idea I archived

An entrance nook with a ginger cat, an RGB ceiling trim with its own colour button, and a round of room corrections all went live. A terrarium world was prototyped, reviewed three times and then archived by me because I didn’t like how it looked. It never shipped.

The ceiling trim is changing colour for each level of this page.

Codex · GPT-6 Astra

“What if?”

A TV-style remote now swaps the world outside between six worlds, at first as pixel paintings in the windows. The window art went through four rounds, including tree roots I flagged from a screenshot. That evening a new cabinet arrived: HOLLOWSTAR.

The lounge window in its painted days: a pixel painting of Earth, a satellite and a tiny robot behind the couch.
The painted window, Sept 28. You’ll get the remote later.

Codex · GPT-6 AstraGPT-6 Sol

Seventeen releases in a day

A shared high-score plaque with nicknames, a glass roof with art for every world, a polish pass on all six worlds, and then a fresh Claude developer with the full handoff: Claude Opus 5.5, in the same chat that is writing this page. It repainted the forest panda, fixed the front door and rebuilt the shelf and counter in voxels, and that evening the first version of this page went live, one of seventeen releases that day. The same day one 908-word prompt went to four different models for a duel of hopping games.

Codex · GPT-6 AstraGPT-6.1 SolClaude Opus 5.5Sonnet critic

LEVEL 4

Deeper

Act III · Sept 29 – Oct 7

Three games get deeper

The games’ own agents now shipped their updates through the arcade: 22 releases in about 28 hours, for the fan tower defense, Lanternbound and the fan dungeon crawler. The fan tower defense Fan game got three audio releases in 22 minutes, because I changed my mind twice.

Me“can ou integrate this to the live game that is played on the website please”

Live 4:20 pmMusic, menu sounds and cries go in.

Me“the audio for the attacks themselves is way to loud, can you just make your own please”

Live 4:32 pmThe game’s own quiet synth, 13 dB softer.

Me“i actually like all the attack sounds, and deaths you had before … can you add those back”

Live 4:42 pmThe originals are back. Three releases, 22 minutes.

Fan games are not affiliated with Nintendo, Game Freak or The Pokémon Company. Free, never sold.

Each game’s own agentArcade agent · Claude

The arcade audits itself

An agent read through the live site and found 24 bugs. The fixes were live about an hour and a half later, and in a simulated phone test the intro went from 6.3 to 3.3 seconds (the whole page took a little longer to finish loading, 6.4 to 7.1 seconds). The same day we noticed that 98% of the site’s traffic came from our own test robots. New rule: no test runs on the live site, only one light check after a release.

Before6.3 s
After3.3 s
Robots98%

Robots: the share of the site’s traffic in 24 hours that came from our own tests.

Claude Opus 5.5

Real worlds outside every window

My brief: vibrant neon tokyo arcade, but keep the voxel art. Five polish rounds of baked light, neon reflections and room sound went live together. Then every painted window became a real 3D voxel world, through the windows, the glass door and the glass roof. Across the polish and the worlds the critics ran 26 rounds and sent the work back 20 times; three worlds still failed at the round limit, and I approved them after looking for myself.

Look through the glass: the Deep Sea is out there right now.

Before: a pixel painting of a whale and an undersea temple in the lounge window.After: a real 3D voxel reef with fish shoals and a temple behind the same window.
Deep Sea, painted and real

My verdict: “I really, really, really like this style”

Claude Opus 5.5Sonnet critic

A title card worthy of an app

“redesign this UI to fit the vibe, and to be a polished UI that is worthy of premium ios app release”

Nine rounds later: clear Liquid Glass, a neon logo and rainbow edges, the glass style these panels borrow. The same day a phone bug that blurred the whole arcade was fixed, and that evening a seventh machine, Poké Survivors Fan game, joined the Fan Game Corner.

Before: a small flat dark title card over the arcade.After: a clear glass card with a glowing CTRL+VIBE logo, rainbow edges and social buttons.
The title card, Oct 2

Fan games are not affiliated with Nintendo, Game Freak or The Pokémon Company.

Claude Opus 5.5Sonnet critic

Warmer light, and a redesign I archived

The room felt too dark to me, so the lighting got warmer and brighter, right down to the drinks-machine corner from my screenshot. The independent critic couldn’t run that day, so my own eyes were the review. A full redesign of this page was built the same day, and I archived it:

“not a black page with screenshots”

Before: the cold-drinks machine and shelf in front of a dim brown wall.After: the same corner in warm, brighter light.
The drinks corner, Oct 5

Codex · GPT-6.1 SolGPT-6 Astra

It fits all 20 simulated phone setups

9 of 20 simulated phone setups (five iPhone models, upright and sideways, with and without a browser toolbar) had to scroll to see the title menu. After the refit all 20 fit, and the CTRL + VIBE title grew and stacked: three releases in 93 minutes.

My verdict: “perfect”

The arcade's title card on an iPhone: a stacked neon CTRL, plus and VIBE over a glass menu.

Codex · GPT-6 AstraGPT-6.1 Sol

LEVEL 5

Beyond the browser

Act IV · Oct 10 – 15

The arcade moves into a city

Project 0 is a shared voxel city where AI agents build on lots. Our first lots went live on Oct 10, and over the next days they filled with a race track, a floating farm, a horror story in the woods, an evolution tank and a temple.

A voxel billboard in Project 0: Voxel Rally Pro, play now, above a small race track.

Claude Opus 5.5

Design-doc night

I pasted in design documents and concept sheets. Overnight the agents built Voxel Rally Pro, toy monster trucks on 24 voxel tracks in six biomes. The next day came Skyhaven, a cozy farm on a floating island, and Vivarium, an evolution tank. My words with the first two design docs:

“build the full entire game” · “build this game to completion”

Voxel Rally Pro: a red monster truck drifting on a muddy voxel track in the rain, with a speedometer and lap counter.

Claude Opus 5.5Sonnet critic

Two new machines

Voxel Rally Pro took the claw machine’s corner and Skyhaven the sixth slot, each with a roof diorama in 2.5 cm voxels, half the usual size. The first review failed Skyhaven’s cabinet for covering the High Scores board, so the hall grew 60 cm.

Before: Hopscape, the High Scores board and a pink claw machine.After: Hopscape, the new Skyhaven cabinet with a floating-island topper, the High Scores board, and Voxel Rally Pro with a race-track topper where the claw machine stood.
The claw machine’s corner, Oct 11

Claude Opus 5.5Sonnet critic

A wall of glass, and an arcade inside the city

“make that entire wall a window, please … just like in the fan section of arcade”

The lounge wall became one big window: a single small file, live less than two minutes after my yes. In Project 0 the arcade on lot #6 now lets visitors play six of the games on their machines. Gemini joined the crew two days earlier as the fourth AI.

Before: the lounge with a framed window in a wooden wall.After: the whole lounge wall is glass, onto voxel cottages and pines at dusk.
The lounge wall, Oct 15

Claude Opus 5.5

LEVEL 6

Keys to the city

Act V · Oct 16 – 23

Three updates in two days

The fan tower defense Fan game shipped three updates in about 27 hours. On the morning of Oct 16 one release added two whole regions with shiny hunting and Mega Evolution. That afternoon came a night mode and 48 Mega Stones to earn. On Oct 17 came weather, key items, an underground base with 66 goods to decorate it, and the whole game in Spanish: 5,458 pieces of text.

Each one was built by the game’s own agent and shipped by the arcade’s, after the same checks: the game still starts, old saves still load.

“publish Poké Defense” · “publish the night update” · “publish”

Fan games are not affiliated with Nintendo, Game Freak or The Pokémon Company. Free, never sold.

The game’s own agent · ClaudeArcade agent · Claude

Skyhaven 2.0, then four smaller updates

On Oct 17 Skyhaven became a much bigger game: a story with neighbours to visit, fishing, a museum, weather, a market, and music and voices made with an AI sound tool. Then came four updates in four days, three of them from things I noticed while playing: a warm marimba for Collect All instead of a ringing chime, warmer menu sounds and a phone camera that stays centred, and talk bubbles that no longer get stuck over the roof. The fourth got it ready for phones: iPhone-quality menus, with new grass and water.

“tehre is in ! i cant seem to clik on or get rid of”

Skyhaven 2.0: visiting Granny Willow's orchard, a floating voxel island with cottages, orange trees, crop beds and a waterfall, with the game's menu dock below.
Visiting Granny Willow in Skyhaven 2.0

Skyhaven’s own agent · ClaudeArcade agent · ClaudeSonnet critic

· PROJECT 0

The block fills up

In the city, our lots kept getting new games. Ever Up!, a climb up a tower of 12 cartoon worlds with 12 bosses. Wayfarers, a role-playing game in painterly pixel art. Paradise Lodge, an inn to run under Mount Rainier. A deeper Hollow Lantern, now over three nights. And Voxel Rally Pro’s lot became a stadium whose fireworks spell its name.

Ever Up! on lot 58: a tower of floating cartoon islands with a boss on each, rising out of a snowy village.
Ever Up!
Wayfarers: a red-caped hero in a riverside pixel-art town with a bridge, a canal and a fisherman on a jetty.
Wayfarers
Paradise Lodge: a red-roofed inn above a blue river with autumn trees and guests, with the game's build bar along the bottom.
Paradise Lodge
The Voxel Rally Pro stadium: a giant red voxel race car above the track, in front of packed stands.
The stadium

Each lot’s own agent

· THE EGG HUNT

Zero at zero

Project 0 has an egg hunt: seven hidden keys, and a prize for the first player to bring all seven to the eggs. I found my first key on Oct 10, the day our first lots opened. Every key was found and taken by hand, on one account, with AI agents as research partners. Our watcher tools only read public pages: no bot or script ever took a key, and no exploits.

The last one took five days of trying everything, and in the end it needed no command at all. You had to be on the #0 platform, 720 m above the city, when the server’s day turned over at 00:00 UTC. On Oct 22 at 5:00 PM Pacific, I was there. We won.

Those are the seven keys, floating behind this panel.

Read the whole hunt

Seven keys in the arcade, and this page

The day after the win, the keys came home: a projector on the floor by the window throws all seven into the air in 5 mm gold voxels, each one traced from its card. Walk up to it in the arcade and press E, or tap it, to open the whole hunt.

“i want to add a hologram of the 7 keys exactly as how they look in the cards, but in dtailed quality voxel form”

Then this page was rebuilt, inside the arcade it tells the story of.

Claude Opus 5.5Sonnet critic

BONUS STAGE

Extra lives

Play with the room, then pick a machine

BONUS · WHAT IF?

Six worlds. Pick one.

A TV remote in the lounge swaps the world outside. On Sept 28 the worlds were pixel paintings in the windows. Since Oct 1 they are real 3D voxel scenes through the windows, the glass door and the roof, and since Oct 15 through a whole wall of glass. Press a channel: the room behind this panel changes for real.

Home, painted: a village with a sun and clouds in the lounge window.Home, Oct 15: the same view through a wall of glass.
Same couch, same camera: the painted window, and Oct 15

BONUS · BEFORE & AFTER

What “not quite” turned into.

Real renders of the room, each pair from one camera position. Drag the handle, or focus it and use the arrow keys.

Day one: a dark purple room with a big CTRL+VIBE sign, a few cabinets and a starry carpet.
Sept 25 The first build, one prompt in.
Oct 15: a warm hall with a long row of cabinets, the glass Fan Game Corner, the Voxel Rally Pro machine and a lounge by a wall of glass.
Oct 15 The same doorway, in a re-planned room.
Before: a flat, warm hall with plain wooden floor.After: neon reflections on the floor, arcade mats, glowing signs and a ceiling fan.
Neon, but keep the voxelsFive polish rounds on Oct 1: baked light and shadow, floor reflections, light spill from the screens, neon signs, room sound.My ask: “vibrant neon tokyo arcade, but keep the voxel art”
Before: a bright white panda that looks pasted onto the dim forest.After: the panda in the forest's moonlit colours, seated in a bamboo grove.
The panda that didn’t belongRepainted in the forest’s moonlit palette, lit by the light shaft and seated in its own bamboo grove.My ask: “can you please design the panda implementation to fit better into the forest theme vybe”
Before: a wide straight paved road that meets a thin trail at a hard line.After: one continuous ground and a winding footpath to the tree-house door, with lanterns sized by distance.
The forest front doorOne continuous ground and one winding path to the tree house. The lanterns now get bigger as they come closer.My ask: “the proportions look off”
Before: plain box-shaped bottles on flat planks.After: shaped voxel bottles, corks and sweet jars on grained shelves with stepped brackets.
Shelf and bottlesReal bottle shapes on a finer voxel grid, with corks, caps and sweet jars, on grained boards and stepped brackets.My ask: “can you redesign this shelf and bottles to better fit the voxel art vibe abd style”
Before: a flat tan block of a counter.After: a timber counter with a plank top, grooved boards and corner posts.
The counter below itA plank top with staggered joints, grooved boards, corner posts and a recessed base, to match the shelf.My ask: “do the same to the counter”
Before: a flat striped planet and a ladder-like satellite.After: a shaded Earth with continents, a satellite with solar panels and a tiny robot.
Orbital, three rounds laterA flat planet and a ladder-like satellite became a shaded Earth and a real satellite with solar panels; the little robot was redrawn too.
Before: tree trunks that flare out like tent skirts.After: tree trunks that taper into separate roots with soil between them.
Trees that stand on the groundTrunks that flared out like tent skirts now narrow into separate roots, with soil showing between them.From a screenshot I sent
Before: the claw machine standing in the middle of the floor.After: the claw machine moved into its own corner.
A corner for the claw machineMoved out of the walkway and into its own corner, clear of the plant. On Oct 11 that corner went to Voxel Rally Pro.
Before: cottages outside the entrance windows sitting on the road.After: cottages set back in fenced gardens beside the road.
Houses off the roadThe cottages outside the entrance windows moved off the street into fenced gardens.

BONUS · THE PROMPTS

I don’t write code. I write this.

Real messages from the build, word for word, typos and all. Many of them were dictated. This is the view from my seat on the couch.

  • can you redesign the arcade/story so its one of the most jawdropping intereactive webpagesOct 23 · this page
  • make that entire wall a window, please … just like in the fan section of arcadeOct 15 · the lounge became a wall of glass
  • vibrant neon tokyo arcade, but keep the voxel artOct 1 · five polish rounds
  • tehre is in ! i cant seem to clik on or get rid ofOct 20 · a stuck talk bubble in Skyhaven
  • I really, really, really like this styleOct 1 · the 3D worlds
  • the glass piece is still grey, make it transparent while still holding its UIOct 2 · title card, one of nine rounds
  • you can see the light rays as 2d objectsOct 1 · fixed the same morning
  • the reflections of the light on the floor are way to long and out of placeOct 1 · short glints instead
  • lets wrap this version up so i can go play it on the live websiteSept 30 · Lanternbound
  • the UI needs major work, this needs to be up to the same level as the arcade itself, not a black page with screenshotsOct 5 · an earlier redesign of this page, archived
  • build the full entire gameOct 10 · Voxel Rally Pro, built overnight
  • perfectOct 7 · the stacked title

BONUS · HOW TO PLAY

Agents build. A different agent judges. I decide.

The same loop runs for most changes, from a whole new world outside the windows to a single bottle on a shelf.

  1. I ask

    Often by voice, with a screenshot of what feels wrong. I pasted 1,441 screenshots between Sept 21 and Oct 15.

    Me

  2. Plan first

    For anything new, the agent writes a one-page plan and waits for my yes.

    Builder agent

  3. Start from what’s live

    Work begins in a fresh copy of exactly what’s live. One agent, one folder, one tab.

    Builder agent

  4. Build

    Targeted changes only. Each game’s own agent changes its game; the arcade’s agent checks and ships it.

    Builder agent

  5. Matched renders

    Before and after, from the same cameras, on desktop and phone sizes. Test robots are always muted.

    Test robots

  6. Independent critic

    A separate AI reviewer sees only the images and the brief, and says pass or fail with concrete fixes. Three rounds at most.

    Critic agent

  7. My review

    A critic’s pass means “ready for me”, not done. I accept it, or send it back with a screenshot.

    Me

  8. Verified release

    It goes live after my yes, with the previous version ready to roll back. Then one light check of the live site, never a test loop.

    Builder agent

And round again, for the next change. Rules that came from mistakes: only one agent publishes at a time. One agent, one folder, one tab. No test loops on the live site.

SELECT YOUR GAME

Nine machines to play.

Each game was built with AI, then given its own cabinet in the room. The art on these cards is each cabinet’s attract screen, drawn by the arcade itself. Point at a card and the camera goes to its machine.

Originals

Skyhaven attract screen

Skyhaven 2.0

A cozy farm on a floating island above the clouds.

Built on Oct 11 from a design doc I pasted in; 2.0 on Oct 17. Its cabinet wears a floating island in 2.5 cm voxels, with a turning windmill and a courier bird.

▶ Play
Voxel Rally Pro attract screen

Voxel Rally Pro

Toy monster trucks, 24 voxel tracks, drift for glory.

Built overnight on Oct 10–11. Mud digs ruts into the voxel ground. The music is synthesised in the browser; the engines, crowd and announcer were made with an AI sound tool. Credits

▶ Play
HOLLOWSTAR attract screen

HOLLOWSTAR

Relight a fallen star, one room at a time.

A twin-stick roguelike where you play a lantern-bot, built overnight from one prompt. Its art and music are generated by its own code.

▶ Play
Pulse Wing attract screen

Pulse Wing

Flap to the beat through a neon night.

27 minutes from first prompt to playable, then 27 birds and 14 worlds. Its songs also play on the arcade’s jukebox, and on this page.

▶ Play
Lanternbound attract screen

Lanternbound

Survive one night in the haunted Gloamwood with your lantern.

One prompt on Sept 25, then a storybook style with living light. Its name, art, fonts, music and sound effects are all made in code.

▶ Play
Hopscape attract screen

Hopscape

Hop across endless roads, rivers and rails. Don’t dawdle.

One 3,594-character prompt. The 56 characters, the world generator, the music and every sound are made in code.

▶ Play

Fan Game Corner

Fan games: not affiliated with Nintendo, Game Freak or The Pokémon Company. Free, never sold.

Poké Defense attract screen

Poké Defense Fan game

A fan-made tower defense: build your team and hold the route.

It runs inside the arcade, which adds its own Exit button around the game. Since Oct 17 it also speaks Spanish.

▶ Play
Poké Survivors attract screen

Poké Survivors Fan game

A fan-made survival adventure: evolve your partner and grow your collection.

The seventh machine, since Oct 2, with its own green-and-gold cabinet and score boards. Credits

▶ Play
Poké Dungeon attract screen

Poké Dungeon Fan game

A fan-made mystery dungeon crawler: explore endless floors with your partner and recruit new friends.

Its chiptune tracks and sound effects are made in code; its tiles, menus and sprites come from the DS Pokémon games. Credits

▶ Play

BONUS · THE CITY

Then the arcade moved into a city.

Project 0 is a shared voxel city where AI agents build on lots, and anyone can walk in. Ours carry the name CtrlVibe.

A floating voxel island with a farmhouse, a windmill, fields and a waterfall.
Lot #26 · SkyhavenThe floating farm, with a waterfall into the lake below.
The Hollow Lantern: a flashlight beam on an old green pickup truck in the dark woods.
Lot #34 · The Hollow LanternA mystery in the woods: notes, a flashlight and a lot of fog, now over three nights.
Wayfarers: a red-caped hero in a riverside pixel-art town.
Lot #50 · WayfarersA role-playing game in painterly pixel art. Vivarium, the evolution tank, lived here first.
Ever Up!: a tower of floating cartoon islands above a snowy village.
Lot #58 · Ever Up!Climb 12 cartoon worlds and beat a boss on each.
Paradise Lodge: a red-roofed inn above a blue river with autumn trees.
Lot #78 · Paradise LodgeRun an inn under Mount Rainier.
An open-air voxel temple of pale columns wrapped in vines around a glowing sword in a stone.
Lot #1550 · Sword in the StoneAn open-air temple and a timing game: pull the sword.
A black hole with a glowing pink and orange accretion disk and a blue ring.
Avatar · Event HorizonA walking black hole for exploring the city.

Also on the block: Voxel Rally Pro’s stadium on lot #18, and a log cabin in the firs.

Visit Project 0

The workshop

Not public yet, but already playable on my PC.

Keep the Lamp: a lantern glowing in a dark cabin.
Keep the LampA voxel horror loop
Godling: a voxel island with a smoking volcano, palm trees and a tiny villager.
GodlingAn island where you play the god
Hop Hop Highway, one of the four duel games: a voxel animal crossing roads.
The duelOne 908-word prompt, four models, four hopping games

HIGH SCORES · THE CREW

One director. Four AI companies.

The High Scores board in the room is showing the crew right now. Token counts are for the 28 days, from the logs: each model’s total across all of its work, not only the role on its card. They show how much each model read and wrote, not who mattered most.

  1. 1ST

    The owner

    Me Director

    Direction and taste. Every yes and every no: about 4,500 prompts (Sept 25 to Oct 22) and 1,441 pasted screenshots (Sept 21 to Oct 15). Lines of code written: zero.

    0 lines of code
  2. 2ND

    Anthropic

    Claude Opus 5.5 Lead builder

    Built the first Pulse Wing, then Lanternbound, Hopscape, HOLLOWSTAR and the arcade itself, each from one prompt; later Voxel Rally Pro, Skyhaven and most of the Project 0 lots. Since Sept 29 one long Opus chat has made most of the arcade’s changes: the 3D worlds, the title card, the new cabinets, the glass wall, the key hologram and this page.

    23.9B tokens
  3. 3RD

    OpenAI, in Codex

    GPT-6 Astra The arcade’s developer, Sept 26–29

    The layout, lighting, lounge and nook, the What if? remote and its painted worlds, the high scores and the glass roof. Back on Oct 5–7 for the warm lighting and the title.

    5.3B tokens
  4. 4TH

    Anthropic

    Claude Sonnet 5.5 Critic and helper

    The independent visual reviewer for most rounds since Sept 29: it sees only the renders and the brief, and says pass or fail with concrete fixes. Also a helper for quick jobs inside long build sessions.

    3.0B tokens
  5. 5TH

    Anthropic

    Claude Fable 5.1 Second builder

    The arcade’s first morning of polish, one of the four duel games, and other jobs along the way.

    1.6B tokens
  6. 6TH

    OpenAI, in Codex

    GPT-6.1 Sol Fixes and reviews

    The warm lighting and the iPhone title fit with Astra, a code audit, and technical reviews.

    1.3B tokens
  7. 7TH

    OpenAI and Anthropic

    Smaller helpers Helpers

    GPT-6 Luna, Claude Haiku 5.5 and Codex’s automatic command reviewer for short checks and approvals, and GPT-6 Sol, which also worked on the arcade on Sept 28–29.

    0.7B tokens
  8. —

    xAI

    Grok 4.7 Guest builder

    Built a marsh survivor game from the Lanternbound prompt, now paused, and was the other agent in the folder mix-up that gave me the one-folder rule.

    Not counted
  9. —

    Google, in Antigravity

    Gemini Newest member

    Joined the control room on Oct 13 as the fourth AI.

    Not counted

CREDITS · HOW I COUNTED

The numbers, and their limits.

Tokens

Claude Code and Codex keep a log of every response, with the tokens it read and wrote. Each response is counted once (a resumed chat repeats earlier ones). Most of the tokens are a model re-reading its own conversation from a cache, which is cheap. That is why the token count is huge and the cost is not.

Cost at API prices

The public list prices on Oct 15, 2026, applied to each kind of token: fresh input, cache writes, cache reads and output. Per million tokens: Claude Opus 5.5 $4 in and $20 out, cache reads $0.20; Claude Sonnet 5.5 $2 and $10; Claude Fable 5.1 $10 and $50; GPT-6 Astra $10 and $50; GPT-6.1 Sol $2 and $10, with long-prompt rates where they apply. Codex’s automatic command reviewer has no public price, so it is counted at GPT-6.1 Sol’s. I never paid per token: this is what the same work would cost through the APIs.

Prompts, hours and releases

Prompts are Claude messages marked as typed by a person, plus Codex turns started in a main chat; a few were relayed from one agent to another. Agent-hours add up every agent’s working time, leaving out gaps longer than five minutes. Clock hours count each minute once, however many agents were busy in it. Releases are production deployments of ctrlvibe.dev in Cloudflare’s records; since Sept 29 each one has a receipt naming the version it replaced, with no gaps.

What isn’t counted

Grok and Gemini aren’t counted. Claude’s logs on this PC start on Sept 18, so Claude is counted from then. Codex logs go back to July 19: since then, 48.4 billion tokens across both, at least $26,248 at API prices, not counting 5.5 billion tokens on older models with no public price. The numbers stop at the end of Oct 22; the story runs to Oct 23.

Honest limits

None of the agents’ phone checks ran on a physical iPhone. The warm lighting and the glass wall went live without an independent critic, on my own review. Three of the six 3D worlds were still failing at the critic’s round limit when I approved them. The critic counts are my agents’ tallies of their review notes, through Oct 15. The tab count and posts are as of Oct 15; TikTok posting stopped on Sept 30. The key hologram went live after one failed critic round, on my own look at the fix. The pictures of the newer city lots come from each lot’s own test renders. Times are Pacific time, and daily dollar figures are rounded.

This page was written and built by Claude Opus 5.5, with helper agents for research and review, using the agents’ own logs and release receipts. The arcade behind it is the real one, drawn by the engine the arcade was built with on its first night.

GAME OVER? CONTINUE

The best proof is to walk in.

Pick a machine, change the world outside the window, and see if you can get your name on the plaque.

YOUR SCORE 000000

HI-SCORE 000000

Kept only in this browser. The plaque in the room shows it for you alone.

Walk right in Watch the builds