a dark terminal

the terminal is dark. a cursor blinks. you begin to type.

An incremental game about the evolution of a software developer through Steve Yegge's 8 stages of AI-assisted development, inspired by the open-source Godot game A Dark Forest (itself inspired by A Dark Room).

You start alone in a dark terminal, manually writing, merging, and shipping code one click at a time. Then an agent wakes up in your IDE — and asks permission for everything. Then you turn the permissions off. By the end, you've built the thing that writes the thing.

play

Open index.html in a browser. That's it — no build step, no dependencies.

Or serve it locally:

python3 -m http.server
# then open http://localhost:8000

Progress autosaves to localStorage. A full playthrough takes roughly half an hour.

the eight stages

stage	name	what changes
1	the dark terminal	you write, merge, and ship by hand. tab completion feels like cheating.
2	an agent in the ide	an agent writes code, but asks permission for every change. allow. allow. allow.
3	yolo mode	you turn the guardrails off. code flows. bugs appear.
4	the wide agent	one agent, the whole codebase at once. merges happen on their own.
5	the cli	no more ide. diffs scroll by — you may or may not look at them.
6	parallel instances	three to five agents at once. you are very fast.
7	the swarm	ten or more agents, hand-managed. you spend more time herding than building.
8	the orchestrator	you stop wrangling agents and build the thing that wrangles them.

mechanics

• code → commits → features → money. Write code (10 lines = 1 commit), merge it, ship it, get paid.
• agents write code passively. At stage 2 their diffs pile up until you click review diffs to allow them; from stage 3 on the code flows freely — but unreviewed agent code carries bugs, which drag down code quality and your revenue. Code you write or review by hand never does.
• chaos sets in at stage 7: every agent past the fifth erodes your focus, and you'll be clicking babysit agents to keep the swarm productive. The only way out is to build the orchestrator.
• upgrades range from a mechanical keyboard to a prompt library to adding the word "agentic" to your landing page.

development

The game is plain HTML/CSS/JS with no dependencies:

• js/engine.js — pure game logic (state, economy, ticks). Runs in the browser and in Node.
• js/ui.js — DOM rendering, the main loop, the event log, saves.
• test/sim.js — a headless bot that plays the entire game and asserts the economy is completable. Run it with node test/sim.js.

credits

• A Dark Forest by TinyTakinTeller and contributors — the inspiration for the tone, pacing, and minimalist log-driven presentation.
• Steve Yegge — the 8 stages of AI-assisted development (and the chimp-wrangling).
• A Dark Room by Doublespeak Games — the genre's dark, quiet heart.

MIT licensed. See LICENSE.