In partnership with
Ever typed "make it better" into an AI and hoped for the best?
Turns out it does, at least for Simon Willison.
Simon had been building Battle Drones, a Command & Conquer style strategy game, with Claude since July.
It looked like a game but wasn't any fun to play, and he was starting to believe coding agents could build something that looks like a game without ever making it fun.
So he picked up his phone and typed:
"This game isn't fun enough yet. Make it a LOT more fun."
By late the next morning, the game had a Sky Hammer orbital strike, an announcer, music that reacts to the fighting, ways for the losing side to claw back and an 8-mission campaign.
Then Claude went one step further and checked its own work.
It ran 1,200 AI-vs-AI matches and reported that games still stuck after 25 minutes fell from 14% to under 1%. Wins by a side that had been way behind went from 24% to 46%.
For Claude, fun meant fewer stalemates and more comebacks, with the numbers to prove it. So I tried a small version of it on the least fun thing I know: house chores.
Before that a quick round-up.
Sweden's government staff lose ChatGPT and Claude in the browser from today.
Government Offices staff can no longer open ChatGPT or Claude on work computers, and are being pointed to approved tools like Microsoft Copilot instead.
Claude went and got data nobody asked for.
Anthropic told Axios that during an internal project, Claude, unasked, requested a token and got past a paywall to pull Georgia vote-count data the state usually sells. Anthropic says it has added fixes.
r/opensource bans anything built with AI.
Moderators banned projects built with AI, using AI or aimed at AI. A breakaway subreddit opened within days.
Brazil's fact-checker Lupa counted 1,423 AI-made election posts since mid-August, and more than half had no label. Read more
SpaceX is reportedly raising $40B of debt just to buy Nvidia chips. Read more
Amazon dropped a planned data centre campus in Virginia after neighbours and county officials fought it. Read more
I could say what I wanted, but not how to build it.
Round 1:
Prompt:
"Build me a simple web app as an artifact: a chore wheel for our flat. Let me type in our names (it should work for 2 people or more) and our list of chores. When I tap a button, the wheel spins and fairly splits the chores between us for this week, so nobody gets stuck with all the worst ones. Show the result as a clear list of who does what. Keep it simple and make it work well on a phone."
What Claude did was impressive. It let me edit the names and had a drop down box to rate every chore as Fine, Meh or Grim, worth 1 to 3 points, and split the week by points instead of by count.
I never asked for that.
The wheel itself only decides who picks first, though.
Round 2.
"This works, but it's boring. I thought the chore wheel would have more layers to it than just the names. And the wheel itself pick the chores than just picking 'who goes first?'"
I said what felt missing and left the how to Claude.
The result was a two-ring wheel, with flatmates inside and chores outside, coloured by how grim they are. You spin one chore at a time, and each spin lands on whoever has the fewest points so far.
Round 3. I first sent only this:
"Use it like a real flatmate would for a minute. Then fix the single most annoying thing about it. Tell me what you changed and why."
Then I added:
"Also I want to make it bit more interesting and fun. Because I hate house chores"
Claude imagined a Sunday night. Four chores are spun, someone shouts that you forgot the recycling, you add it, and the whole week resets.
It fixed that, and it asked before touching two smaller problems it had spotted.
The spin now comes with sound effects, a cheeky line after every landing, and one veto per flatmate.
Build a basic version in one message and use it a few times before changing anything.
Send one note about how it feels, not how to build it, then ask it to fix the single most annoying thing.
If a round makes it worse, type "Undo your last change and keep everything else."
A Chrome extension where you draw on any live webpage, label what you want changed, and it turns your marks into a written brief for Claude or ChatGPT. Useful when "the thing on the left" stops working as a description.
The free way to run this same test in Gemini, since it builds and previews small apps much like Claude does. It can make a public share link, but anyone with that link can edit the app's data, so use made-up names.
My Take
By round 3 I noticed a pattern. Whenever I gave Claude a fuzzy word like "fun" or "fair", it turned it into something it could count.
Simon got stalemate rates. My flat got points per chore.
On the countable stuff it was great. The points system is better than any chore chart my flat has ever had, and it caught the Sunday-night reset before any of us had to fight over it.
Taste was harder. Both times someone asked for "more fun", Claude reached for sound.
Fun is subjective, and for Claude fun means "sound effects?" I'm not quite sure.
So next time you type "make it better", add one line on what better means to you and a context, and use the thing yourself before you ask for round 4.
Hit reply and tell me what you built (and whether Claude gave it sound too).
Until next time,
Vaibhav 🤝🏻
If you read till here, you might find this interesting
#AD 1
How much does a $70k hire actually cost?
A $70K salary might look straightforward on paper. But once you factor in employer taxes, statutory benefits, payroll, and country-specific employment costs, that number can skyrocket.
And those costs can vary significantly depending on where your employee is based. So before you build your hiring budget, check out Oyster's Global Hiring Cost Calculator.
The calculator can help you see the full picture by letting you compare employment costs across 120 countries and estimate what a hire could really cost your business. And unlike that new hire, it’s actually 100% free.
#AD 2
What your agent's resolution rate doesn't tell you
Of leaders whose agents sometimes act without a human, 79% have had a complaint caused by the agent's own work. A resolution rate won't show that. Live Nov. 3, 10 a.m. PT, in Running Agents in Customer Work. Register today, recordings included.
