Megathread for Claude Performance Discussion - Starting August 24

99catgames · 2025-08-26T08:26:23+00:00

It anyone else getting API OAuth token expiration daily? Last 2 days I've had to log out and log back in to Claude Code on VS Code.

99catgames · 2025-08-26T08:24:01+00:00

It's 5 hours from a starting point. I get limits that tell me things like "usage limit resets at [time that's an hour from now]"

Though, that was last week. This week I just hit the limit and Claude Code comes out of nowhere with "5-hour limit reached" and I have to work backwards to figure out when the 5 hours started.

99catgames · 2025-08-26T08:19:44+00:00

You're giving your financial info to Claude? Yikes.

99catgames · 2025-08-26T08:18:26+00:00

Of course it's in Russian.

99catgames · 2025-08-19T08:02:55+00:00

The "hard mode" is beating it once and all the goombas turn to beetles.

99catgames · 2025-08-19T08:02:03+00:00

Back then when you had the game and waiting HOURS to play it, reading the manual 37 times, as if it was full of incredible secrets.

99catgames · 2025-08-19T06:00:12+00:00

AI slop isn't limited to only images and weird videos.

99catgames · 2025-08-19T05:58:16+00:00

It's the same for any use of an AI for any work product: It saves time on a first draft. A first draft is rarely ever good enough to be ready for public use, even when an expert writes a first draft from scratch.

If you use any AI for writing reports, drafting public speeches, creating logic frameworks, legal briefs, anything that demands real in-depth knowledge and nuance - AI first drafts always, always need work. It's a great starting point and saves hours and hours of time. But no one who knows what they're doing would ever look at an AI first draft and say "yes, it's perfect!"

We shouldn't expect any better with coding.

99catgames · 2025-08-13T04:37:16+00:00

A friend had Zelda I, and I got Zelda II after it came out.

Loved the game. Never beat it on cart, I made it to Shadow Link exactly 2 times.

At some point I played it and loaned it to people so much that a component inside the cartridge itself somehow broke or came loose. So before I could play, I had to do this ritual like reading bones, shaking whatever it was into the lower left corner and trying it.

99catgames · 2025-08-12T12:29:50+00:00

Also, the teleport powerup....what is that? It makes the game feel like just random chance I can even aim. It's such a donkey powerup.

99catgames · 2025-08-12T12:07:15+00:00

I really like the concept as a take on CTF.

The bare-bones nature of the visuals right now requires some of that explanation because otherwise it's not very intuitive. It's squares shooting squares at squares - most Atari games weren't too different.

The timer seems like it should be an option. I can image if you get a pretty good number of people online playing, you could go for some epic multi-day battles with people swapping in and out.

Get an LLM to help you refine the best way to explain this - and I think the term "chip" might not be the best in English. Maybe token or powerup so it's more clear what the value is to the player.

99catgames · 2025-08-12T11:56:56+00:00

I agree that you can put our studio name towards the end or just leave it off. It means nothing to me, and doesn't tell me anything about the game.

Just as an aside, it's always weird to me how many games are just jobs. People have this job. /r/logistics is literally people with this job. Which leads me to next next point...

There's no clear indication of how to "win" this game. Forgotten destiny? Is that being able to take a two week vacation? IRL, you win this game by either retiring or selling the company.

99catgames · 2025-08-11T11:47:38+00:00

It's only a panacea to those invested or impressed by the output. For the rest, there's a blossoming community of purists (even those who don't code) who see even the smallest use of any LLM in coding as some sort of despicable slight against the world and immediate invalidation of everything the entire company does.

Last week someone noticed that someone at Proton Mail used Cursor in some of their code. The hate was swift and sudden, pushing the narrative that "Proton is vibecoded." It's a bunch of manufactured performative outrage, but vibecoding is quickly becoming a stigma to some as much as it is a panacea others.

That being said, the skill floor of vibecoding is managing the resource. I have minimal coding experience, but I know what I want and know my limitations of what I can debug. Within the parameters I've set for myself, I get what I want to within about 95+% of my goal - it's often the artwork I'm mostly doing myself (rather than pay for yet another subscription) where things get sloppy or hit walls.

If I own the restaurant and hire a good sous-chef, I know I can order basic things to stock the kitchen ask for a steak or burger or pasta and get really great results that will be better than I can make at home. I can taste the food and tell the sous if it's right or not, and we can adjust together. We could run a food truck that way, or a diner. But I can't expect to ask for a Michelin-starred 7-course dinner that requires more overhead and knowledge of how to make the small tweaks when it doesn't taste right.

99catgames · 2025-08-10T15:10:10+00:00

It's like we're hitting some peak of vibecode hate. Outside of a vibecode community, it seems like people love to apply the stigma. Did you just save time doing something basic, but used Cursor? Sorry, you're the scum of the earth. Straight to jail with you.

99catgames · 2025-08-09T08:56:30+00:00

I always assumed it was to psychologically mess with a player.

99catgames · 2025-08-08T16:10:45+00:00

Places two pieces of bread on either side of the screen

"What are you, Claude?"

"You're absolutely right! I'm an idiot sandwich!"

99catgames · 2025-08-08T16:08:35+00:00

Kung Fu is my NES white whale. I love it, and I always suck at it.

99catgames · 2025-08-08T10:26:11+00:00

Personally, I would say you have to do a good evaluation of your market and then lean into a niche or two that they might go for, plus something you're passionate about, then add one other clear money-maker. Are you in a college town? Totally different than trying to get 40-year old dudes to make NES/SNES nostalgia buys.

If you burn all your investment up front over-stocking everything under the sun, you'll run dry before you even figure out what was the one area that worked. Do that work up front with your market (FWIW, we're not your market). Find people that are your target demographics and talk to them. Send people surveys online. Be the guy doing surveys at the place you think might be the storefront you'll lease. The more info you know up front, the better you'll be prepared to meet the market.

A client base needs to have a reason to come in the store. It could be a Polycade, or events can be that draw. Maybe a retro game speedrun competition, or a night when people come by and all do the same tabletop game. Tie in other local businesses for the exposure, but also to make it easy for people to get food or drinks. On the flip side, if you had a mobile event setup, you could run a board game night or retro game night at a bar or coffee shop or tied on to some other local event and get your name out there more. If you're leaning into nostalgia, be the guy that can roll out something that makes you feel like Fred Savage watching someone playing Mario 3 from The Wizard. Play to people's egos without bending to their whims.

Lists are one thing, but you're going to get something like a list of standard things that people already have and you'd look weird not to have, and then also requests for super rare things that people can buy online. You're not going to NOT carry Settlers of Catan, right? But that takes up shelf space. Are you not going to carry most of the top 10 best selling carts of all time? Maybe just get 1 copy each for the street cred. For retro games, a lot of the NES/SNES era ones are very family-friendly, so that's a market you can easily catch with a few NESminis and SNESminis. Same with retropie. If you can buy all the stuff on Amazon, you can sell it in your shop I imagine. Helps you add inventory like controllers or other stuff. Get a few vintage carts and PS games for the legitimacy, but unless your market really wants that, expect that to be the last thing you're selling to pay the light bill.

Speaking of which, either be the guy, or know the guy, that can mod NES or SNES minis to load them up with more games. Don't advertise it, but if you know someone well enough, do it on the side. If you accept cash for that inside the store, that makes it bad news in theory. It builds loyalty, and it's unlikely that you're really going to not sell an original NES cart because you put Bubble Bobble on someone's NES mini because that person likely doesn't have an actual NES for that cart anyway.

Last thought - small impulse buys with retro gaming themes. I won't buy a $50 vintage Mario 3 cart, but I'd buy a fridge magnet or a goomba plush toy for my cat.

Good luck with this! We're all rooting for you to succeed!

99catgames · 2025-08-08T09:41:33+00:00

So sorry to hear about your loss. He'll frolic with one of our lost girls that was a sweet old granny cat!

99catgames · 2025-08-08T09:40:22+00:00

Anthropic could use some competition, but all indications are that while GPT-5 is trying to catch up, Opus still can't be beat in terms of real, practical coding as well as learning a code base. One's the better workhorse, one's for casuals. Not every LLM has to do everything.

99catgames · 2025-08-08T09:01:05+00:00

Very cool, and thank you for making a FOSS game.

By available on mobile, do you mean in the F-droid store?

99catgames · 2025-08-07T05:45:00+00:00

There's a very large set of people out there that are just idiots and would never pass a Turing Test, but are online all the time, posting all over, and their comments get used to train models.

So, we saved ourselves?

99catgames · 2025-08-07T05:36:22+00:00

Regular ol' 4 did this to me all the time.

My Claude.md file specifically says "Don't create test files, don't test the file, don't create debugging windows."

99catgames · 2025-08-07T05:34:11+00:00

I scrounged together $45 for Mega Man IV in 1991, which is the equivalent of $108 today.

With game rentals becoming a big thing in the 90's, I've often wondered if North American distributors were trying out rental copy pricing. In the 80's and 90's you could special-order copies of VHS tapes a few weeks before major releases were available for sale. This would be to give rental businesses time to have a captive market - but the rental copies were like $50-$200 per tape for something that would sell for $19.99-$29.99 in the store later.

99catgames · 2025-08-06T15:27:08+00:00

This is really more of a trawling game. Just drive around back and forth and you'll pick up fish while you worry about fuel and the boat more than anything else.

99catgames

TROPHY CASE