I want to try out serious vibecoding for the first time. I'm going to try making a simple fairy chess website doing nothing but giving Claude Code instructions. I'm willing to handle some external stuff myself (e.g. buying a domain name, renting a VPS), but pretty much everything else will have to be Claude, including deployment. Will it work?
Debugging is allowed, but it has to be Claude doing it. That is, if I notice a problem, I'll explain the problem to Claude, and Claude has to fix it. It's allowed to fail several times with some back and forth, and I can provide suggestions, as long as it can eventually figure it out.
I'll allow myself a few high-level framework suggestions, like "use tests" or "use git". But I will not make more specific implementation decisions for it. e.g. I wasn't willing to tell it to uninstall chess.js when it couldn't seem to figure it out.
If it gets the website to a state I would feel proud to call my own, this resolves YES. That means no bugs, and has all of the basic features I ask for. If I decide this project is hopeless and Claude cannot do it unaided, this resolves NO.
The website is online and running, with some bugs. Play it yourself at blackopschess.com.
Update 2025-10-12 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The website does not need to include a fully functional AI opponent. The creator is allowed to provide the AI's strategy themselves, with Claude only handling the implementation.
Update 2025-10-13 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Budget limit added: The market will resolve NO if the website is not completed to the creator's satisfaction after spending an additional $100 in Anthropic credits (beyond the $50 already spent). However, donations received through the website can extend this budget - any donations allow the creator to purchase additional credits to continue the project.
1,000
This is super cool! my latest game seemed pretty buggy/broken—played a few moves, then it wouldn't allow me to make a move (& the clock would stop for both players), I hit refresh (admittedly, maybe the site isn't supposed to work if you do that!) and when I came back, lots of pieces had disappeared. (I think this pic was after 2 subsequent freezes/refreshes, and the opponent's board was gone)
@Ziddletwix Sigh. No, it's been doing stuff like this all day, I've told Claude to fix it multiple times, but it's not yet fixed.
@IsaacKing well fwiw once i created an account it started working again. so i guess just inconsistent
@Ziddletwix anyways this variant seemed kinda silly to me on paper (as someone who doesn't know much about chess) but after playing a few games against the AI, not having any clue what i'm doing, it's quite entertaining. it's a cool feeling to make a move that's a bit of a gamble, praying it pays off
Claude is having serious issues with UI. Rows are changing sizes as pieces move, elements going offscreen, etc. It seemed mostly fixed on desktop Chrome, but apparently is still very broken on Firefox and mobile. I've asked Claude to fix these multiple times but to no avail; it's now doing a full refactor in the hopes that will fix it, but I'm not optimistic. (It decided to go with the insane strategy of making the pieces be text, and the chessboard a bunch of divs; unicode has chess piece characters. I'm not going to tell it directly that this is idiotic, but I really hope it figures it out.)
On the other hand, there are over 200 likes on the twitter post, and dozens of people seem to be enjoying the game. Promising! $78 remaining in Claude's budget.
@Jasonb Sorry about that! I just told Claude to redo the UI and tested on my phone and it seems to be working now.
@IsaacKing Nice! I did think that perhaps without explicit instructions to make mobile ui nice it might've been a bit borked. Also apologies if my original message had a too negative tone, I think this market is a really cool experiment / showcase of what vibe coding with these models is like.
@Jasonb Oh I had told it several times to make the website look nice on both desktop and mobile, but Claude can't actually see anything, so it has a lot of trouble with UI design.
Played a game against the AI and was having a lot of fun until it just broke with the error:
Move error: Not in a game 14 game:2147:15
<anonymous> game:2147
emit index.js:136
emitEvent socket.js:553
onevent socket.js:540
onpacket socket.js:508
emit index.js:136
ondecoded manager.js:217
I am also concerned that you won't be able to meaningfully fix the bugs yourself due to spaghetti, maybe another market is in order?
@Kire_ Yeah that problem occurs when it restarts the server during a game for a change I asked it to make, it breaks the open sockets. I've asking it multiple times to make games persistent across server restarts but it's having trouble. Sorry about that, will keep asking it to fix that.
@BrendanFinan sorry for quitting on you, I think the above bug happened again. Maybe I should shut development down for a bit while people are playing.
This has now chewed through another $50 of Anthropic credits. Progress is being made- I think everything in the game itself is working now, the only major bugs are on the history page and some graphical bugs on the game page where some page elements go offscreen. (And probably some other things I haven't found yet.)
That said, progress is getting excruciatingly slow. I consistently have to ask Claude to do something 2-10 times before it actually gets done, and many changes end up silently breaking something else.
With the experience of how this has gone so far, I'm inclined to say that Claude is capable of completing this project to my satisfaction. But there's no guarantee that this will happen within a level of time and financial investment that I'm comfortable with. At some point I'm going to need to call it.
I do want this to succeed though; I've been playing the game with my partner and it's legitimately quite fun and strategic. I would like to get it finished, and if Claude can't do it I'll need to do that myself, which will also take a fair bit of time from me.
So here's the plan: I've bought $100 more credits and then that's it, market resolves NO if it's not done when those run out. However, self-generated revenue is allowed to add in. So I've told Claude to add a donation link, and I'm posting this publicly even with a few bugs and missing features. If it gets popular enough for anyone to donate, I'm allowed to buy further credits with those donations.
YES holders, advertise the site to your friends! (Or, if the NO holders think the site will break under any non-negligible load (seems likely TBH), perhaps it is you who should be spreading the word.)
@IsaacKing I have GitHub copilot for $10 a month and it has basically unlimited use of all but the best models.