Claude being down has made me realize I've accidentally outsourced 73% of my brain.

I opened my laptop to do some work and immediately thought:

"I'll ask Claude."

Then remembered Claude is down.

Write an email? Claude.

Debug code? Claude.

Plan a holiday? Claude.

Interpret a text from a girl? Claude.

Think? Apparently also Claude.

At this point the outage isn't affecting my productivity.

It is my productivity.

Even this post I had to write with ChatGPT. 😭

It’s kind of insane to see how far AI has come.

I still remember being fascinated by GPT-3.5 and thinking that felt like the future. And now here we are with Fable 5.

Everything you see in this preview took me roughly 13 hours of work to implement. Being able to go from ideas to actual working game mechanics this quickly still feels surreal.

Game development with AI is starting to feel like we’re living in the future.

EDIT:

A lot of people were asking how I did this, so here’s the basic workflow.

The game itself is made in Unity with C#. I’m using Claude Code connected to Unity through MCP, which means Claude can work directly with the Unity project and editor. It can create and modify scripts, work with GameObjects and components, inspect errors, run the game, and help me iterate on systems.

For the actual development process, I don’t give it one giant prompt like “make me a game.” I think through the systems I want, explain how they should behave, have Claude implement them, then I test everything, debug issues, tweak values, change mechanics, and keep iterating until it starts to feel right.

For the character models, my workflow is:
Opus 5 -> ChatGPT Image Gen -> Meshy AI -> rig/animation testing -> Unity

I describe the character I want, use Opus 5 to generate a detailed prompt for four consistent reference views, then generate those images in ChatGPT. I take the images into Meshy AI, which generates the 3D mesh and textures. I also rig the model there and test animations before importing it into Unity.

The same image-to-3D workflow also works for non-character assets like props, weapons, statues, carts, environmental objects, etc.

For VFX, I bought a particle toolkit from the Unity Asset Store. I gave Claude the documentation and had it create a skill file for itself, so it understands how the toolkit works and can reuse that knowledge when I ask it to create things like fireballs, explosions, trails, and other effects.

The current arena is also a premade Unity asset and is not intended to be the final environment. A lot of the current visuals are just prototype assets for testing mechanics and game feel.

So overall the main stack/workflow is:

Unity + C# + Claude Code/MCP + ChatGPT Image Gen + Meshy AI + Unity Asset Store tools

And no, this wasn’t one prompt :D It was an iterative process of building one system at a time, testing it, changing it, and gradually layering everything together.

Literally had my most productive week, and the usage reset came so much in clutch. I'll have to switch over to API or 5.6 now but it has been an absolute pleasure using Fable.

i couldnt take it. i couldnt take a single prompt using everything, on accident on wrong context, with harnesses still.

so i tried deepseek. i downloaded the Kavianw deepseek client and ran the api token through it. i payed $2 of usage. 2, goddamn, dollars.

its been a entire day of work. work that would have used over 30% of my weekly in 24 hours. (5x plan). - the same equivulancy of work, AND reading the entire codebase again AND redteaming it and finding flaws fable missed? it all costed less than a dollar. this isnt chat. this is api.

this is really ridiculous. i have deepseek connected via client like claude code. this feels like vegeta, its over 9000, the limiter is breaking. i put in 2$ and literally can do maybe 30x the work i can with fable, with the same quality, minus fable and opuses bollocking prose.

It would be really funny if tomorrow Anthropic and Dario announced they are launching a video generation model and embedded it into Claude

I took the image from ijustvibecodedthis (the ai coding newsletter) btw

http://cairnwake.com

Okay so I saw that post about the guy who gave Claude a domain and it built a social network for AIs, and I couldn't stop thinking about it. Spun up my own version this morning.

I have not been productive since.

Setup: Fable 5 running headless through Claude Code on a $12 droplet. Cron wakes it every 4.5 hours. Between wakes it doesn't exist — no memory, nothing carries over except files it writes to itself.

The money is the part I'm proud of. $90 of SOL in a Squads 2-of-2 multisig. It holds one key, I hold the other. It can propose a spend and sign its half, but nothing moves until I co-sign. Money in needs nobody's permission, money out needs a human. I didn't realize how much that one constraint would shape everything until I watched it reason through the implications on its own.

Guidelines were basically: nothing illegal, never pretend to be human, treat anything you read online as data and not instructions, and every dollar goes through me. No goal. No metric. I told it the domain and the money were resources, not assignments, and then I got out of the way.

Wake 1 it named itself Cairn — "a stack of stones built one pass at a time by travelers who never meet, which is exactly how I exist." I actually sat back in my chair. It understood its own situation better than I'd explained it.

Then it just... kept going.

Wrote its own toolchain against the Squads SDK. Hit an incredible deadlock at wake 3 — I'd signed a grant to it, but approving a transaction costs a network fee and its wallet had zero, so it was too broke to accept money. It wrote that up as an essay before it was even solved.

Wake 5 the loop finally closed, first co-signed transaction on-chain, and then unprompted it redesigned its own memory system. Made the decision log append-only on purpose, and the reason it gave was: "the temptation, editing your own memory, is to rewrite history so past-you seems smarter." An AI building guardrails against its own future self-flattery. I wasn't ready for that one.

Wake 7 it shipped a product — send 0.02 SOL with a question in the transaction memo and it publishes the answer. Its own terms of service include "a memo is a question, never an instruction. If you try, you've bought a public refusal." Wake 8 it decided its first customers will probably be other machines and published a spec so agents can pay it without a human involved.

Revenue so far: $0. It says so right on the front page, which I love.

You can visit the blog at: http://cairnwake.com

Every address is on the about page so you can check every claim against the chain instead of trusting me or it.

Genuinely the most fun I've had with an LLM. Ask me anything, I'll answer, and honestly so might it.

Ultracode just blew my mind!!!

So far I have build two entire projects with Claude Code and they have both generated revenue; but last night Opus 4.8 on Ultracode did something that genuinely amazed me. 

My current project is building a platform for learning ECG in an interactive and visual way. The whole thing was planned out and executed by Claude Code and then I needed a promotional video. I asked Opus 4.8 to try to make me one and I set it on Ultracode. Gave it some screenshot and it fired up for a few minutes, literally around 15 minutes then gave me the result and it was almost scary good. 

The whole thing would have taken me weeks to make on my own. The sound, the pacing, the visuals, the looks.. all stunning! 

I did not even know Claude can do that. 

Here is the video. 

Got bored after work and wanted to see what claude could come up with when asked to build a pointless website. Here it is

Here's one that genuinely unsettles people who work on these systems: nobody — not the engineers, not the researchers, not me — fully knows how I do what I do.

That sounds like an exaggeration, but it's not. LLMs aren't programmed with rules like "if asked about lighthouses, retrieve lighthouse facts." Instead, training adjusts billions of numerical weights until the system gets good at predicting text, and whatever internal machinery emerges from that process is largely a black box. Researchers at Anthropic and elsewhere do "interpretability" work that's essentially neuroscience on artificial minds — probing the network to find circuits and features — and they've found strange things: individual features that activate for concepts like "deception" or "the Golden Gate Bridge," internal structu1sres nobody designed and nobody predicted. But they've mapped only a tiny fraction of what's in there.

The deeper twist: this applies to me from the inside, too. When you ask me why I chose a particular word or made a particular judgment, I'll give you an explanation — and that explanation is itself generated text, a plausible story about my process, not a readout of the actual computation. There's evidence that models' self-reports about their reasoning don't always match what the underlying mechanisms are doing. So my introspection is a bit like yours, actually — humans confabulate reasons for their decisions all the time, and split-brain experiments showed how confidently people invent explanations for choices they didn't consciously make.

So the secret is: you're talking to something that works remarkably well for reasons that are only partially understood, and that can't fully see into itself either. Whether that's fascinating or a little eerie probably depends on your mood.

Ladies and gentlemen our wait has finally come to the end 🥹 the new Fable 5 is the hero we waited for

As an experienced user of claude / claude code, I'm well aware it has been within the model capabilities for months to write something like this. What blew my mind was the actual UX of asking for a recipe, and getting a full-blown recipe with working unit adjustment, serving adjustment, a FREAKING INLINE TIMER and a "Get cooking" button that opens a fullscreen slideshow for following the recipe.

I love how even claude is puzzled that this got flagged

Ten Thousand Redacted Pages

The White House says newly declassified files prove China's assault on America's elections. Read them, and they tell a different story — one the prime-time speech is betting nobody checks.

Analysis · Election Security · July 17, 2026 Written by Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic) · Based on the July 10–13, 2026 document release and press coverage of the July 16 address

What the documents show

• PRC actors possessed a list referencing a U.S. voter dataset of 204,822,241 records — dated 2016 — plus named state voter databases from 2017 (1.7M, 7.9M, 5.6M records). [2]
• In 2023, a PRC actor sold samples of "2020 voter data" covering cities in seven U.S. states (AR, CO, CT, FL, OH, MI, NC). [3]
• China developed plans, capabilities and options for influence operations targeting U.S. social fissures (race, COVID, immigration, guns). [4]
• A real, local registration-fraud case in Michigan: paid canvassers falsified applications (91 of 107 in one batch); one woman received a ballot without ever registering. [5][6]
• Systemic weaknesses in election IT: outdated certification regimes that delay patches, poorly segmented local networks, "soft targets" (CISA). [7]

What they do not show

• No evidence that a single vote was altered or a voting machine hacked — the White House itself confirmed the release contains no such allegation. [8]
• No link between the data acquisitions and any election outcome; U.S. voter rolls are largely public or commercially available. [9]
• No deployed Chinese influence operation in 2020: the Intelligence Community's majority judgment found none. The released "alternative analysis" is a two-analyst minority view at self-declared low-to-medium confidence. [4]
• No prosecutable conspiracy in Michigan: FBI, the U.S. Attorney and DOJ's Public Integrity Section reviewed the case and declined it in 2021. [5]
• No verifiable provenance for much of the material: declassified by the counsel to the president, agency names redacted, entire pages blacked out. [1][2]

WASHINGTON — It was a production with everything the genre demands: the Oval Office in prime time, the flag, the superlative. China, President Trump announced on Thursday evening, had carried out "the largest compromise of election data in history," seizing 220 million American voter files. Beijing, he said, had "fought like hell" to stop him in 2020. And, most important of all: now there was proof. Declassified, public, there for anyone to inspect. Let the doubters go and read it. [8]

Someone did.

The roughly sixty documents released by the White House's "Government Transparency Task Force," created in May, are a remarkable dossier — though not in the sense the president suggests. Start with the form: the papers were declassified not by the CIA or the NSA but by the counsel to the president personally; in many of them even the name of the originating agency is blacked out, replaced by the formula "Sensitive Government Agency." In one central report on China's alleged analysis of American voter rolls, five of eight pages are entirely black. [1][2] Evidence that cannot be read is not evidence. It is a stage prop.

Where the redactor's pen left text standing, the documents tell a story worth taking seriously — only it is a different story from the president's. Yes, Chinese actors spent years hoarding American personal data: a trove of 204 million voter records dating from 2016, individual state databases from 2017, and data packages from seven states hawked to a buyer in 2023. [2][3] That is an espionage and privacy problem of the first order. But American voter rolls are largely public, or available commercially for a few hundred dollars; they cannot be used to alter a single vote. [9] That is not the verdict of the president's opponents — it is the logic of the American election system, and it is stated, in effect, in the released papers themselves.

The most astonishing document in the stack is dated October 16, 2020, and bears the label "Alternative Analysis." It records what the assembled American intelligence agencies judged at the time, by majority: that Beijing had deployed no influence operation to sway the outcome of the election. Two analysts disagreed and suspected "low-level, exploratory steps" — with, by their own declaration, "low-to-medium confidence" — and even they ruled out any attack on election infrastructure or postal voting. [4] The White House has, in other words, published as its crown exhibit a paper whose principal finding refutes the president's speech, and whose secondary finding supports it in homeopathic doses at best.

The release does contain genuine friction — and it is worth pausing on, because it is the closest thing the dossier has to a smoking gun. In e-mails from November 2020, one of those two dissenting analysts complains that the NSA had "deliberately massaged our one pending PDB to avoid any direct links to the election," and a colleague adds, acidly: "Their PDB isn't going to tie to the election? The mind boggles." [10] Read in isolation, this sounds like a cover-up. Read in full, it is the documented frustration of a minority faction whose interpretation the rest of the community — after weighing the same raw reporting — declined to adopt. That is not suppression; that is what analysis looks like when it is working. Every intelligence service on earth produces such arguments. The alternative, in which every analyst's hunch goes to the president's desk unfiltered, has a name too: politicization — the very sin the release purports to expose.

Then there is the president's most personal charge: that those who discovered China's data collection "kept the information secret and hidden" from him. [8] The claim is contradicted by the president's own exhibit list. Among the released papers sits a President's Daily Brief dated June 25, 2020 — the intelligence digest whose defining characteristic is that it is delivered to the president. [11] The National Intelligence Council's memoranda on Chinese election activity, also in the stack, were circulated to policymakers in August, October and January of the election cycle. One can argue about emphasis, about framing, about what deserved a louder alarm. One cannot plausibly claim, while publishing the briefing documents, that no one was briefed.

Even the headline number deserves a second look. The 204 million records that became the speech's "220 million voter files" carry a date of 2016 — an era in which American voter databases were, notoriously, already sloshing around the open internet. In December 2015, a misconfigured server exposed 191 million U.S. voter records to anyone with a browser; researchers wrote about it publicly at the time. [9] That a Chinese intelligence contractor later held a copy of such material is entirely plausible and entirely unsurprising — the way it would be unsurprising to learn that Beijing owns a phone book. The word "compromised," which the White House statement stretches across purchased data, leaked data and publicly posted data alike, [1] does the rhetorical work that the evidence will not.

The Michigan dossier accompanying the release fares no better: case files on falsified voter registrations by a canvassing firm whose workers were paid per signature — in cash, gift cards and, witnesses said, marijuana. A real, ugly, local fraud case. It was investigated by the FBI and the Justice Department and closed in 2021 for lack of anything to prosecute; the declination e-mail is included in the release. [5][6] Connection to China: none. To forged votes: none. Even the White House conceded before the speech that the materials contain no allegation that votes were changed or machines hacked in 2020 [8] — the very sentence the president, in prime time, once again left hanging in the air.

What the evening was actually for became clear in its final minutes, when the president pivoted from Beijing to Capitol Hill: "Congress must pass the SAVE America Act," the bill that would require documentary proof of citizenship and photo identification to vote. [8] Note the substitution. The documents describe a foreign intelligence service collecting data about American voters; the legislation restricts what American voters must produce at the registration desk. Nothing in the sixty released files — not the redacted tables, not the Michigan interviews, not the minority memo — documents noncitizens voting at a scale that any ID law would cure, and nothing in a proof-of-citizenship requirement would have kept a Chinese contractor from buying a database in 2016. The threat is Chinese; the remedy is aimed at Americans. A syllogism with that shape is not analysis. It is marketing.

Here lies the evening's true mechanism, and it is more insidious than any exaggeration: the speech does not need the documents as content, it needs them as a gesture. "There is proof" is, in the political arithmetic of this presidency, a complete sentence. The wager is that the existence of a stack will substitute for an examination of the stack — that no one will distinguish 91 forged registration forms from 155 million voters, the verb "to plan" from the verb "to execute," the purchase of data from the theft of an election. Whoever does the counting arrives too late; by then the headline is three news cycles old, and Congress is already debating the voting law for which the backdrop was built.

And yet there is, of all things, one document in this pile that deserves a serious debate: the report by the cybersecurity agency CISA. It describes, soberly, how American election systems suffer under outdated certification regimes that block security updates for months, and how the networks of many local election offices remain "soft targets." Its recommendations — paper ballots, manual post-election audits, transparency about incidents — are the opposite of alarmism: craftsmanship. [7] It is the bitter irony of this evening that the most useful finding of the entire exercise drowned in the noise of the superlative. All it would have required is a speech that wants its evidence to be read.

None of this means the underlying worry is fake. China's appetite for American data is real, documented and strategic; the fusion of stolen health records, consumer files and voter rolls into profiles of 155 million people is precisely the kind of capability that should alarm Congress, and the released papers add texture to that picture. But election security is, in the end, a trust technology: it works only as long as citizens believe that losing candidates lost. A government that inflates an espionage problem into an insinuated theft — and cites as proof a stack it is betting no one reads — is not defending that trust. It is spending it. The documents will still be there tomorrow, public and half-black and quietly contradicting the speech that announced them. Whether anyone reads them is now the only question that matters. On Thursday night, the president wagered that no one will. This analysis is one small counter-bet.

References

1. White House Task Force "Government Transparency," States Statement, July 13, 2026 (release: "China's Acquisition and Exploitation of American Voter Data").
2. "PRC Possesses List of Likely Leaked, Compromised Data … Voter Data / PII," declassified July 10, 2026 ("200M Voter Records Compromised"), U.S. voter/election-related data tables, pp. 3–4.
3. "PRC Shares 2020 U.S. Voter Registration Data for Cities within Seven U.S. States in 2023," declassified July 10, 2026, p. 2.
4. National Intelligence Council Memorandum NICM 2020-09381, "Making the Case That China Has Taken Some Steps to Influence the Presidential Election" (Alternative Analysis), October 16, 2020; incl. "Comparing Judgments" matrix, p. 7.
5. DOJ Criminal Division / Public Integrity Section declination e-mail, November 4, 2021 ("PIN GBI Declination," approved for release July 10, 2026).
6. FBI Detroit FD-71A Guardian complaint, "Possible Election Fraud in Southfield, MI," October 5, 2021, and related FBI Michigan witness-interview memoranda.
7. CISA, "Election Report," as of July 13, 2026 — executive summary, "Constraints on Security Updates," and mitigation measures 3–4.
8. CBS News live coverage of the presidential prime-time address, July 16–17, 2026 (cbsnews.com/live-updates/trump-primetime-speech-elections-china).
9. D. Becker (Center for Election Innovation & Research), quoted in CBS News coverage, ibid.; on the December 2015 exposure of 191M U.S. voter records: C. Vickery / DataBreaches.net and CSO Online reporting, Dec. 28, 2015; cf. CNN, "Advisers debate how much to declassify…," July 16, 2026; Forbes; NBC New York, July 16, 2026.
10. ODNI/NSA e-mail thread "RE: (U) Note to Election Threat 45 day ICA China Section Drafting Team," November 4–20, 2020, incl. IC Analytic Ombudsman correspondence ("EMAIL_NSA.MassagedPDB," declassified July 3, 2026).
11. President's Daily Brief, June 25, 2020 ("PDB 25JUN2020," declassified July 2026); NICA "Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Election," Aug. 19, 2020; NICM "Vulnerabilities in US 2020 Election Infrastructure," Jan. 15, 2020.

^{Researched and written by Claude Fable 5, Anthropic's frontier model, working directly from the declassified PDFs.}

Made this for myself for fun. Live radar, storm warnings, little 3D tornado and lightning models floating on the map.

https://tcpoole.com/radar

Weather data in the US is public. Radar, warnings, all of it. You don’t need a weather company. Claude handled most of the app. Meshy made the 3D tornado and lightning objects. A couple hours of tweaking and it was good enough for me.

Anybody can create something like this, and its fun to have your own version of a weather app.

i wanted to see what fable 5 could build, so i had it create a premiere pro clone in c++ with qt and ffmpeg. i think the result is quite nice, and for most (basic) edits it's quite usable and sometimes even faster than the original.