Ask HN: Can a MMO be vibe coded?

I can’t find it now but there was a pretty good blog post on HN(it was marketing a product to solve this problem, but felt legit). That basically divided game development into four stages. Stage 1 is you can just one shot vibe code the boiler plate, stage 2 is you can like more specifically vibe code certain features, then I forget specifically, but like you have to have pretty deep subject matter expertise to handle the networking code.

(This was written by someone with game development experience I believe)

No, "vibe coding" means you don't look at the code, nor care about it. You could probably manage to get together a prototype, maybe even get it to deploy, but eventually it'll fall over in it's own slop. The tooling isn't ready for a non-software engineer to maintain a large-scale software project, don't let the marketing fool you.

However, if you are a software engineer, armed together with an agent, I don't see why not. Come up with the architecture/design, stick to it, and you could probably get something to a polished state at one point.

Assets are the main bottleneck.

Everything can be vibe coded. Even high quality stuff. Net code is just as easy and hard as anything else. It's just time put into effort and vice versa. But time and effort are not things you can 'vibe acquire'. It takes *discipline*.

Only people with the patience to "vibe inquire" all the stuff they need to be "vibe taught" in a great many conversations with LLMs, which means vibe understanding things that need to be documented, which is the only thing that can't be vibed-- except if you are the type who turns napkin scribblings into screenplays and books and doesn't miss appointments and forgets logins written down on tiny pieces of paper and envelopes--can vibe code "anything".

LLMs replace any amount of industry-standard libraries with vanilla code and they will teach you why and what and how.

But you have to be patient and willing to understand. At some point you'll be looking through code and get some of it. And you'll see stuff that is unnecessary and you'll ask the LLM "isn't this way too much code for something so simple"?

Writing it yourself will still take a hundred lookups in shitty docs and you'll find 23 libraries that abstract all of it away along the way but you absolutely will be able to write the code yourself.

It's like learning french because you want to fuck. You can just use non-verbal communication and be bold and just vibe long and often enough and you will score and pick up french along the way but you can also learn french. Or do it all at the same time, or rather at different times within the same time, which is weeks, months, years.

How much life do you have? How much do you want? Why can't you just do things like everybody else and just do them how they do it? What was missing in your life? Whatever the world was lacking in the past, it's lacking it, still. You can vibe anything. It will take a year or two or three or more, anyway, but you will make really quick progress before it turns into the average kind of work that is only as fun as you make it. And it will only be frustrating if you stop inquiring. Just be radical and relentless and vibe.

But be sure to document everything meticulously. Build your own docs and collections of samples and snippets. You can let the LLM give you python code that does stuff to text and images, video and audio that you need for other stuff 'downstream', which is a place you will constantly find yourself even though you haven't been upstream, yet. The same goes for Blender objects. Once it gets complicated, calm down, hermano, stay caliente, and inquire.

LLMs will throw a shitload of shitty code at you. Make sure to let the LLM teach you and tell you when to split a conversation, even in tools like cursor and whatnot ...

LLMs will stick to some path they ended up on because they traversed their data within the constraints of the progression they went through during your conversations. These paths will make simpler solutions seemingly inaccessible to them and you will not know that any simpler solutions exist because you don't know anything and can't know what the LLM missed because you phrased something like a fucking moron.

Whenever it gets way out of proportion, (and does not work), don't get frustrated but ask if this can be done simpler or what are the simplest examples and components that wire something similar together. No need to go Faiynmen method or subatomic deep space repeating or anything like that. Just keep vibing. There's a reason you want to build your own MMO. 8 billion people and most things will never exist. Don't let your mind get lost in the many illusions of psycho-social prerogatives of interpretation (don't vibe learn what all of that is, you have better stuff to do).