A iOS developer with 9 years of experience spent 15 days to create the Capybara food delivery game, fully relying on AI without writing a single line of code, and won $25,000 (approximately 170,000 RMB) in the Cursor Vibe Jam2026 competition. This marked a landmark victory for AI-generated code projects in the global annual "Vibe Coding" game development competition.

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188 submissions in total, Claude generated 27,000 lines of code

The developer, known as u/Ieocoout online, shared his entire experience on Reddit on July 10. In terms of AI interaction, he completed 188 submissions and used Claude to generate approximately 27,000 lines of code. The game's logo, illustrations, textures, and 3D models were all generated by AI. In terms of cost, he topped up $100 to upgrade the Claude Code plan from 5x to Max 20x, and also used the free trial versions of the GPT images2 model and Grok model to handle game textures and illustrations, making the total investment very low.

The developer was responsible for writing prompts, planning, testing, and fixing gaps that AI could not handle throughout the process. The only difficulty he encountered was that AI-generated 3D map effects were poor. To solve this, he manually built a European-style city using an editor, which took several hours to form a playable city environment. The multiplayer mode used a single global city and lobby, with player positions and item stacks transmitted in real-time via WebSocket on Cloudflare.

New Paradigm Born from AI Programming Competitions

Vibe Jam2026 is an annual "Vibe Coding" game development competition hosted by independent developer Pieter Levels, attracting a large number of developers worldwide to compete in full-code generation projects using AI tools like Claude Code. This competition itself represents the evolution trend of AI programming from an auxiliary tool to an independent development capability.