I'm making a SimCity clone for fun, and I created a ton of tickets in my local Gitea instance describing the different systems I wanted implemented. The tickets were mostly two to three sentences, and then I asked Opus to fill out some of the details and come up with some ideas from SimCity and Cities: Skylines as inspiration. It created a plan off of all the tickets I marked and ordered them, then went through them over 33h.
It delegated everything to sub-agents and ran code reviews all automatically. I've play-tested it for an hour and it seems solid? I used Opus 5.5. I can share the build if you want to take a look at it.
Here is the prompt:
"You are a goal agent who will oversee the implementation of many system implementation issues. Look at the issues in gitea labeled 'systems' AND 'ready'. Create an order to do them in."
The plan it made:
Wave 1: cheap, and several later steps depend on them
- Commute Time #140: publish the commute times traffic's commute search already works out, with a heatmap. Land value then uses them in place of its "jobs within 480 m as the crow flies" stand-in.
- Population #143 step 1: age shares (children and seniors). Schools, health and deathcare all need these. Then step 2: wealth from land value, which already exists.
- Pollution #141 steps 2–3: air pollution with wind, then ground pollution; each also adds its term to land value (#142).
- Parks #150 step 1: one park kind and its field, read by land value.
Wave 2: services on the coverage kernel
- Education #105 step 2: the other four school kinds (uses the age shares). Then step 3: the education stock in population.
- Health #147 steps 1–2: health from air pollution, then clinics and hospitals. Clinics are also coverage step 4 (the second service, and searches shared between services).
- Garbage #146 step 1: a landfill that is also a depot; the stock it fills.
- Fire #149 steps 1–2: fire hazard, then stations as coverage.
Wave 3: utilities
- Power #66 step 4: high and low voltage, so substations become required.
- Water & Sewage #145 steps 1–4, then Pollution #141 step 4 (water pollution from the sewage outlets). Water and garbage then add their terms to health.
- Garbage #146 step 2: incinerators (make power and air pollution) and recycling.
- Money #80 steps 3–5: loans, then department sliders and condition, once there are enough departments for the sliders to matter.
Wave 4: climate and events
- Climate #134: temperature and rain through the year.
- Seasons #133: changes power demand and solar output.
- Power #66 steps 5–6: wind, solar, batteries; line limits.
- Drainage #47: runoff, storms driven by climate, drains.
- Fire #149 step 3 (fire events and rebuilding) and Health #147 step 3 (deathcare).
- Natural Disasters #135: needs climate, seasons, floods and fire events.
Wave 5: close-out
- Ordinances #81: goes late because the modifiers need the systems they modify to exist.
- Population #143 step 4 (happiness, the city rating), then close Land Value #142.
Blocked outside this set
- Parks step 2 (edit mode and props) needs Custom Lots #64 step 4.
- Land value step 3, and the demand half of education step 3, need Demand #103.
- Garbage step 3 (moving garbage between facilities) needs Freight #151.
The UI is very AI slop feeling still, I imagine I'm going to have to tweak that myself.
It caught lots of bugs like overflow in the sim, fields not spreading as you would expect, badly tweaked constants where the bus lanes were messing with the traffic sim too much. I've only play tested it for a bit, but it seems like it came out okay?
What's cool is that I created a protocol for the agent to talk to the game and move the mouse and monitor sim systems. So it's able to run the game and test manually for me and sanity check things as well as write tests.
If individuals had power to allocate funding or not to public research projects rather than get a blanket tax, there would be a lot more conventional marketing in the public sector as well.
Of course not. I'm so tired of the chess analogy. It was always a game and it was always performative.
Research is fundamentally different. We are seeing the erosion of specific needs for thinking at depth. AI is the automobile for the mind. There will 100% be undesirable consequences and selective atrophy of cognitive abilities once prized. This is a loss. There's no getting the cat back in the bag at this point so long as the objective dimension of work, as in object opposed to subject, is held as the most important.
SWEs felt this same crisis late last year. Now it's the mathematicians. They won't be the last.
actually I think the whole point is we're finding that the chess analogy to math is in fact quite apt. Math is just an extremely complex game. Its rules can be written down and there are win conditions. It's really not far fetched to think that through information theory, a reasonable measure of depth and beauty to a definition or conjecture can be defined. Then the game is simply to maximize the number of such artifacts produced of high depth and beauty along with proofs of the relevant conjectures.
Philosophers I'm sure can debate this back and forth but it seems probable that some things we thought were ineffable are in fact quantifiable to a degree, and now we have the technology and the machines to bring that to the logical conclusion.
I also found LSP like skills to usually have no advantage over rg. The agent needs to read the code to understand it; navigation is a small portion of that.
reply