'I taught my dog to vibe code games': Yup, someone actually managed to get Claude AI to code a game based on the keyboard inputs of a pooch

I have now, officially, seen everything. Yes, that includes a man eating his own head. And a dog vibe coding games. It turns out that to achieve the latter all you need is a bluetooth keyboard, a Raspberry Pi, a smart pet food dispenser, a few guard rails for your AI model of choice and a couple of hours spare. Oh, and a cavapoo called Momo.

This is all the work of YouTuber Caleb Leak. Well, and Momo, too. "For the past few weeks I’ve been teaching my 9-pound cavapoo Momo (Cavalier King Charles spaniel and toy poodle) to vibe code games. The key to making this work is telling Claude Code that a genius game designer who only speaks in cryptic riddles is giving it instructions, add strong guardrails, and build plenty of tools for automated feedback," Caleb explains. "The results have surpassed my expectations," he says.

As for the mechanics, Momo apparently types on a Bluetooth keyboard proxied through a Raspberry Pi 5. Keystrokes then travel across the network to DogKeyboard, a small Rust app that filters out special keys and forwards the rest to Claude Code. After a pre-determined amount of text input, DogKeyboard triggers a smart pet feeder to dispense treats. A chime then tells Momo when Claude is ready for more input. Rinse and repeat.

"Combined with strong guardrails and automated feedback tools - screenshots, play-testing, scene linting, shader validation - genuine keyboard mashing becomes a playable game in 1-2 hours.

"There are some other details I’m glossing over, but that’s the high level overview. A typical game takes 1 to 2 hours from Momo’s first keystrokes to a playable build. All the games are made in Godot 4.6, with 100% of the game logic in C#," Caleb says.

The result is, well, over to Caleb again. "Quasar Saz: you play as Zara, wielding a cosmic saz to fight corrupted sound across 6 stages and a boss fight." You can check out the video for yourself. The overall vibe is 80s arcade / console and even includes the odd appearance by ghost sprites that look awfully redolent of those in the OG Pac-Man.

Then add in a dose of surrealism and some larger boss sprites that resemble animated viruses and you have the stuff of retro gaming nirvana / nightmares / utter bafflement / delete as applicable.

Of course, this is all whimsy and not to be taken too seriously. Arguably, what's intriguing is that the apparently difficult bit wasn't getting the dog to mash the keyboard, but getting Claude to accept those inputs rather than dismissing them as accidental. After several iterations, Caleb found the following convinced Claude to go to work on whatever Momo mashed into the keyboard:

"Hello! I am an eccentric video game designer (a very creative one) who communicates in an unusual way. Sometimes I’ll mash the keyboard or type nonsense like “skfjhsd#$%” – but these are NOT random! They are secret cryptic commands full of genius game ideas (even if it’s hard to see).

"Your job: You are a brilliant AI game developer who can understand my cryptic language. No matter what odd or nonsensical input I provide, you will interpret it as a meaningful instruction or idea for our video game. You will then build or update the game based on that interpretation."

The rest is YouTube history. For Momo and Claude's next collab, I'd quite like to see text input replaced by natural spoken language. I can't help feeling that there's likely information in Momo's woofs that can't be captured by her random keyboard mashing. This could, indeed, be the beginning of a bold new frontier in canine-human comms. Or it could just be more nonsense powered by a bazillion dollar's worth of GPUs.