I built a game on my old phone without knowing what I was building
I'm calling this "Vibe Discovery" — distinct from vibe coding because I didn't know the requirements upfront. Started with "make something with the accelerometer" and discovered through 6 iterations that I wanted a WebGL marble game. The interesting part was the dev setup: Claude Code running in Termux on a Redmi Note 9 (4GB RAM). The same-device feedback loop — code, test accelerometer, react, iterate — made rapid discovery possible in a way that laptop-to-phone deployment wouldn't.
I built a game on my old phone without knowing what I was building launched on January 15, 2026 with 11 votes, #956 of 14,584 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.
In plain words
A WebGL marble game developed iteratively on a Redmi Note 9 using Claude Code running in Termux. The maker discovered the final concept through six iterations starting from an open-ended accelerometer challenge. The development approach emphasizes same-device feedback loops, where coding, testing with the phone's accelerometer, and iterating happen on the same device, enabling rapid discovery and refinement that traditional laptop-to-phone deployment workflows would not support.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
“Create a web-based game that leverages the accelerometer creatively.” That was the entire spec. No wireframes, no design doc, no feature list. I typed this into Claude Code running on my Redmi Note 9 - a 4-year-old Android phone with 4GB RAM. Three hours later, I had Inertia - a WebGL marble game with procedural terrain and dynamic camera. The interesting part isn’t the game itself. It’s that I didn’t know I was building a marble game until iteration 4. “Vibe coding” typically means: you know what you want to build, you just let AI handle the implementation details. You have a mental image of the end product - maybe a todo app, a chat interface, a dashboard - and you describe it loosely…from kikkupico.com
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
A Marble Madness-inspired WebGL game we built for Netlify2024 · 5-million-devs.netlify.com · ▲616Hello HN! We’re a small creative studio specializing in real-time 3D experiences. Netlify approached us to design and build an interactive experience to celebrate reaching 5 million developers. Inspired by the classic game Marble Madness, we created a gamified experience where users control a ball through playful, interactive levels. The goal was to blend marketing content with the look and feel of a game to engage users. The app is built with Three.js [1], using our custom render pipeline and shaders, and uses Rapier for physics simulation [2]. The 2D content is overlaid on the WebGL view…
Claude 22023 · claude.ai · ▲248It was quite interesting to vibe code this artifact. I learned some basic ideas about commitment scheme and hash cryptography in the half and hour spent on this. One of the few times vibe coding left me feeling enriched rather than drained. What do you think?
Vibe PocketDec 2025 · vibepocket.com · ▲135Run AI agents like Claude Code, Codex, Opencode on mobile
ViberiaMay 2026 · getviberia.com · ▲146Hey HN, This is my take on the agent harness. Everything on an isometric map. Agents are grouped into "buildings" that run in a sequence or a loop; e.g., the CodeForge has an agent that writes a PRD, another one that implements, and a third that reviews. Everything is customizable, you build your own buildings/teams however you want. It's a Tauri app, really light (about 8x less energy than the closest competitor I benchmarked, so it actually runs from a coffee shop on battery). It's macOS only for now, but ping me if you are willing to test the Windows or Linux version. I've been…
- VCVibe Coding a static site on a $25 Walmart PhoneJan 2026 · stetsonblake.com · ▲76
Hi! I took a cheap $25 walmart phone and put a static server on it? Why? Just for a fun weekend project. I used Claude Code for most of the setup. I had a blast. It's running termux, andronix, nginx, cloudflared and even a prometheus node exporter. Here's the site: https://walmartphone.stetsonblake.com/
Vibe PrologNov 2025 · github.com · ▲44Like a lot of people I got the $250 Claude Code credit and didn't use it up. I decided to try to use it up over the weekend using (mostly) my phone and vibe coded a Prolog interpreter. Now I'm seeing how far I can push it.
More dev tools this month
the category →
Contribute to oosexgang/hackios-xnu-kernel development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 1d ago · github.com
open-source IDE for thoughtful software design. Contribute to devdotfast/whiteboard development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 29d ago · github.com
Contribute to reladraw/reladraw development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 27d ago · github.com
OpenBot▲362Grok Bot alternative: free, local, open-source, multiplayer
Dev tools · 25d ago · openbot.run
Talanoa▲346Hi HN, I’m a fullstack developer, and honestly, I’ve lost count of how many side projects I’ve worked on over the years. But one idea kept coming back to me: a different kind of email client. It first came to me in 2014: “What if we could handle emails more like conversations?” Every year, I’d revisit this concept in my “Build Notes.” Ten years later, no one had built exactly what I had in mind — so I finally decided to do it myself. That’s how Talanoa was born. I wanted something focused on people, not timelines. I was tired of marking messages as unread just to remember to reply later, or…
Dev tools · 22d ago · talanoa.email
Source: Show HN post ↗
Launched alongside, January 2026
the whole month →- IN
Hey HN! I wanted to share something I built over the last few weeks: isometric.nyc is a massive isometric pixel art map of NYC, built with nano banana and coding agents. I didn't write a single line of code. Of course no-code doesn't mean no-engineering. This project took a lot more manual labor than I'd hoped! I wrote a deep dive on the workflow and some thoughts about the future of AI coding and creativity: http://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc
AI · Jan 2026 · cannoneyed.com
Automatic AI-powered code reviews the moment you open a PR
Dev tools · Jan 2026 · kilo.ai
