Developer Aims to Vibe Code GTA 6 Before Official Release
▼ Summary
– AI startup founder Ziwen Xu is attempting to build his own version of Grand Theft Auto VI using AI “vibe coding” before the official game releases in November.
– Xu posted on X on day one showing a basic 3D blue oval moving around gray blocks, but by later updates the game included a human character, buildings, NPCs, cars, and weapons.
– The project is inspired by a suggestion to see if Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 could “vibe code” a GTA-caliber game, with Xu sharing daily progress and code on GitHub.
– Xu has burned 33% of his weekly usage for the advanced AI model in one day and noted that the AI incorrectly built Los Angeles skyscrapers instead of a Florida setting.
– Vibe coding is a new approach where developers use natural language prompts with AI assistants to generate and debug code, with mixed opinions from tech founders like Jack Dorsey and Andrej Karpathy.
With Grand Theft Auto VI finally slated for release this November after nearly a decade of development, the anticipation among fans has been palpable. After all, it has been over twelve years since Grand Theft Auto V first hit shelves in 2013.
One AI startup founder, however, is taking impatience to a new level. Instead of waiting, he is attempting to vibe code his own version of the blockbuster game before Rockstar Games can ship the real thing.
“Day 1 of building GTA 6. Still feels fake typing that out,” posted 25-year-old Ziwen Xu on X this Wednesday. “Upgraded to Claude Max 20x just for this. Spent a couple hours getting the whole project structured and pushed to the repo.”
The accompanying video clip showed a humble start: a 3D blue oval bouncing and jumping around a collection of gray blocks.
Despite the early simplicity, Xu appears genuinely committed. He has been sharing daily updates since the initial post and has even made the code repository public on GitHub. This raises the question of how much time he is diverting from his primary role as founder of Hyperecho, a startup that helps businesses deploy “AI employees.”
“The goal: beat the real GTA 6 to launch. Ambitious, probably stupid, doing it anyway,” Xu wrote.
The inspiration for this project traces back to a post from fellow AI startup founder and investor Matt Shumer. “Someone should set up a community-funded Fable run with a prompt like: ‘/loop until you’ve created a GTA-VI-caliber open-world game with a quality and scope surpassing what is shown in the initial trailers,'” Shumer wrote in a post that Xu later shared.
At its core, the experiment aims to test whether Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 , a safer, public-facing version of the more advanced Mythos model , can successfully vibe code a game of Grand Theft Auto’s scale and complexity.
Vibe coding is a relatively new development methodology where programmers rely heavily on AI assistants to generate and debug code using natural language instructions. Some notable tech figures have embraced it. Jack Dorsey, for instance, vibe coded at least two apps last year. Meanwhile, OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, who first coined the term, has described using AI agents as “net unhelpful.”
By day two, Xu posted a video showing a far more human-like character running through an urban environment, though he acknowledged the results were still rough. “The agent built downtown LA skyscrapers, which is a problem, because this is supposed to be Florida,” Xu noted. “Also I’ve burned 33% of my 20x weekly usage in one day. So that clock is ticking.”
As of today’s update, the game now includes NPCs wandering around, cars driving on roads, and even weapons.
It remains to be seen how far Xu and his collaborators can push this project. Their deadline is still months away, unless Rockstar decides to delay the official release yet again.
(Source: Gizmodo.com)
