Easy to start, can get quite complex, heartily recommended!

[0] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/230802/azul

Why reinvent the wheel?

/s

I mainly wrote this as a reflection on many accounts of OSS maintainers burning out.

Much has changed since 2016, but I believe the point still stands. The arrival of AI based coding (and Pull Request floods), and the tendency of many VC backed startups to "open source" their components has made the picture more complicated.

Last year I wrote a sort of a followup, geared towards founders and businesses, on how to use open source as a part of a business strategy: https://senkorasic.com/articles/open-source-strategy

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24653

The Economist often has satire columns, mostly related to office or biz absurdities.

As a lefty, I would rather never write another word then twist my hand the way he's doing (above the current line) to avoid the smudges.

I have seen funded AI startups that made less sense.

* Kimi K3: 9532k input (9172k cached), 114k output - cost $5.5

* Qwen 3.8 Max: 18020k input (17836k cached), 114k output - cost $6.3

* Fable: ~14m input (all cached??), 196k output - cost $30

Correction on my earlier post, Kimi was through Pi, not Kimi Code. For Qwen I used Qwen Code and for Fable I used Claude Code.

Not sure wtf is going on with the Fable stats (a lot tokens, virtuall all of them were cached - I guess heavy system prompt?) but both claude code stats and ccusage tool output match.

However they do seem very close to SOTA : I’d say roughly equal to previous gen (Opus 4.8, GPT 5.5). It’s yet another silly benchmark, but compare them here: https://senko.net/vibecode-bench/

I also had K3, Qwen3.8 and Fable (using Kimi Code, Qwen Code and Claude Code harnesses respectively, and the official APIs) create a simple but far from trivial web app (zero shot, from a detailed spec). In user testing all three results looked/behaved more or less the same. I had Sol (via codex) do code reviews on all three and it concluded all three were solid, with some room for improvement. Fable was slightly ahead of the pack.

In my own work I still prefer Opus 4.8 (until Antrophic come to their senses and allow 100% Fable usage on Max plans) and Sol, but if I had to find an alternative, I could live with both K3 and Qwen3.8 just fine.

Clearly much better than the Terra version. I'd say its on par with Fable, and the observed differencies are more due to random luck and open-ended prompt, rather than model capability. (Edit: after some more testing, perhaps not on par - somewhere between Opus and Fable, is a better description).

Fable did better pathfinding and has more terrain variety, visually the map looks better, especially soft edges of the fog of war. And the enemies.

Sol took more care with tiny ux details, added help, and more building varieties.

> Create a simple but functional real time strategy (RTS) game similar to old WarCraft, StarCraft or Command & Conquer games. The player should be able to build buildings, create units, gather resources and should uncover the whole map. No AI or multiplayer needed. Use simple but nice-looking graphics. No sound. Implement everything in HTML/CSS/JS, everything in a single file (you can use 3rd-party js or css libraries/frameworks via CDN).

It even has enemies! (I'm not too mad about it not following my instructions because it can be fun to play :) And I generated that from Claude Code on my phone.

Sonnet 5 also produced a pretty nice version. You can see all of them here: https://senko.net/vibecode-bench/

However, I would say it is a measure (not the measure). If you look at the entries, there's a lot of variation - definitely not something they memorized outright.

And the test itself is deceptively simple. You need to do canvas rendering, there's pathfinding, command queueing, terrain generation, etc. There are some subtle click handler bugs (various LLMs often stumble on those). And I ask the model to do it all in one file, further increasing the complexity of the task.

And the result is something that you can instantly evaluate. And if the result is any good, even play! So yeah, I think it's a fair test.

I'm sure it'll get saturated at some point. Actually I started with Minesweeper and switched to RTS last December, because Minesweeper was being saturated. I'm expecting (hoping?) the RTS test will last until the end of this year...

Comparing this to other models, I find it similar to GPT-5.5 and a bit behind Sonnet 5. You can see how other models fared here: https://senko.net/vibecode-bench/ (you can also fetch the prompt and the the 5.6 Terra resulting code on from that page).

I don't have access to Sol yet (on a Plus sub, which should get it according to what I've read), so can't do the more interesting test. I'll update the above page as soon as I get access - hopefully soon.