Vibe coding, GBA tarot solitaire, and the glitch video revolution

P.P.S. for Did I make this?

The “Did I make this?” cover image is a digital collage that I fed through a chain of glitch art programs to get a glitchy and lofi aesthetic.

I did all this using a desktop app I’ve been working on called Videodesk. The idea with Videodesk is that there are some excellent video synth and glitch art tools that can run in your browser, but being in a browser puts a bunch of annoying limitations on them, like not being able to send video signals to and from other apps. Videodesk is still in the early phases, and I’m loving messing around with it and I think others will too once it’s more polished.

But the main reason I wanted to use Videodesk for “Did I make this?” specifically is that it’s another example of a project that I would never have been able to take on without the help of an AI coding assistant. And I strongly suspect that AI coding assistance is why we all of a sudden have a bunch of new and unreasonably feature-rich glitch art programs like Bendr and Videoskillet. (This is not true for Hydra, which has been around for years—huge shout-out to Olivia Jack who created it!)

I didn’t talk about Videodesk in this piece because it didn’t fit the narrative in a few ways. I wanted to focus on projects where there were significant contributions from an AI coding assistant, but where I had maintained a clear boundary between what I implemented myself and what I assigned to Claude. I also wanted to focus on original game and puzzle concepts I am working on, since they walk that instrumental value/intrinsic value line between art and software.

Videodesk definitely falls in the camp of “software with purely instrumental value.” I have a problem, I think other people (in the glitch art niche) have a similar problem, and right now vibe coding makes solving software problems faster and easier than it’s ever been in the past.

Another vibe coding project that I’m currently working on is a Game Boy Advance demake of a niche game I’m obsessed with called Fortune’s Foundation. It is a brutally difficult solitaire game that uses tarot cards instead of a normal deck. It’s absolutely crazy to me that I can be like “hmmm it would be neat if I could play this on my Game Boy” and have a working prototype in a few hours. This one again has primarily instrumental value—I’m able to add a bunch of quality of life upgrades I wish were in the original game, and now I can play it on the go without my laptop. This has also sent me down a bunch of fun GBA development rabbit holes.

Capturing the puzzle atmosphere within the limitations of Game Boy Advance audio.

All this is great fun. It’s also kind of addicting. I mention it briefly in the main post, but I do worry that all these AI-empowered game/software projects are pulling me away from the analogue explorations that I consider to be the core of my creative practice. Ironically, while puzzle books and Game Boys and solo card games are ways that I have created space from the internet in the past, I’ve been so caught up in the work of making my own that my screen time is at an all-time high. Hopefully this will change soon.

So I really am incredibly excited about all these projects. But Claude Code is heroin for creative workaholic computer nerds, and I do think that I need to rebalance my creative attention.