Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Spending 10 months building the most human-like chess bot
Marcus Buffett details Chessbook-1, a 199M-parameter transformer trained on a year of Lichess games, and benchmarks it against Allie 2.0 and Maia-3 on predicting human moves, matching playing strength at every rating, erring in time scrambles and predicting how long a human would think.
13 min · 3,000 words
Epic's EAC2 v2 seems fairly easily bypassable
Matthew Garrett looks at Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat Linux v2 announcement and argues the design still looks bypassable in practice—walking through why userland anti-cheat on Linux is a hard security problem.
3 min · 683 words
StarSkirmish Bench v0.2 has flagship LLMs spend one hour in their first-party CLI harness writing a StarCraft: Brood War Protoss bot in C++, scored by win rate against human-written bots. GPT-6 Astra leads, GPT-6.1 Sol offers the best value, and the benchmark shows no signs of saturating.
6 min · 1,365 words
AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary.
Popcar surveys how coding agents are mass-decompiling game binaries, unlocking preservation and modding—while raising awkward questions about IP, security, and what ‘source available’ means when AI can recover readable code at scale.
6 min · 1,336 words
How we built the AssetHoard MCP server
AssetHoard’s Mark Gandolfo explains how the library’s built-in MCP server lets Claude Code, Cursor, and other agents search owned game assets and export into a project—and why the server is locked down so file contents stay on the user’s machine.
10 min · 2,254 words
One-shotting an Unreal Engine plugin from a 3,000-line plan
Jack Minnetian describes writing a 3,000-line plan for a voxel painting tool in Unreal Engine, handing it to an agent that returned more than 25,000 lines in fourteen hours, and what the success and failure modes say about plan-driven coding agents.
15 min · 3,353 words
Getting old Macromedia Director Games to run on modern Hardware
WerWolv revives German point-and-click adventure games from the early 2000s, such as "Findus bei den Mucklas", by reverse engineering the CD-check copy protection that Macromedia Director games shared, patching it so the games run from copies on modern Windows, and notes many similar titles used the same mechanism.
12 min · 2,806 words
Last weekend marked the four-year anniversary of Ludicon. I started Ludicon because I believed that working independently would let me do my best work. Building software on my own, I can move fast, take risks, and focus on problems others don’t consider practical, or slow down and go deep into rabbit holes without having to justify myself. I’m happy with the quality of the work I’ve produced, excited about what is yet to come, but disappointed with its commercial success so far. In retrospect, 2022 was not a particularly good time to start a game middleware business. In…
4 min · 854 words
500+ Billion Tokens Later: Letting AI Agents Decompile A First-Person Shooter
Maurice Heumann describes three months spent orchestrating AI coding agents to produce an accurate, compilable C++ decompilation of a popular first-person shooter, focusing on agent orchestration, infrastructure, harness design and verification rather than the game itself, and estimates 600 to 700 billion tokens were spent.
10 min · 2,206 words
Friday Facts #447 - Factorio that you can touch
Factorio’s Friday Facts #447 covers a physical Factorio experience: how a playtesting event snowballed into a touchable factory build players can visit, with design notes from the Wube team.
10 min · 2,235 words
mantle.nes breakdown blog part 1
Drmelon walks through building mantle.nes—a multi-month NES demake/fangame of a Deltarune Chapter 3 sequence—covering constraints, techniques, and why the project took shape.
16 min · 3,755 words
The science of Monkey Island: can grog actually dissolve a metal mug that fast?
Journal of Geek Studies tests the Monkey Island gag: whether acidic grog could dissolve a metal mug, with chemistry, history, and experiment notes.
16 min · 3,665 words
How GPT-6 Astra ascended NetHack: setup, agent loop, tool use, failure modes, and what beating a famously hard roguelike says about LLM agents in open-ended environments.
11 min · 2,477 words
Ben Swerdlow benchmarks Codex, Claude, and Grok agents across 171 StarCraft: Brood War matches—leaderboards, APM, cost per game, and analysis showing none played beyond beginner while Codex Astra led.
9 min · 2,151 words
Simon Sapin models Factorio Space Age quality upcycling with transition matrices and equilibrium equations, then builds an interactive TypeScript calculator for gambling, washing, upcycling, and asteroid reprocessing loops.
15 min · 3,372 words
Software occlusion culling in Block Game
Eniko walks through software-rendered occlusion culling for a voxel/block game on a weak integrated GPU—why CPU-side culling mattered, how the technique works, and the performance wins on modest hardware.
16 min · 3,579 words
qntm's 2015 analysis of the puzzle game Braid, working world by world through its distinct time mechanics — rewind, time-immune objects, shadows, rings, and position-linked time — and what each means for causality and puzzle design.
22 min · 5,139 words