Ask HN: Anyone creating their own entertainment?

This week I kept hearing animated sounds from my wife's phone while she played a new puzzle game. She very quickly got upset with the app after it started demanding she watch more ads to continue playing.

Last night, Claude recreated the app - a single HTML page with a daily challenge, all-time stats, as many generated puzzles as she wants without ads. Oh and it's cat themed this time (of course).

At dinner we started talking about whether people will start creating their own personal entertainment, beyond just simple puzzle games, like TV episodes, maybe entire TV series, maybe movies...

We were (somewhat in hesitation) imagining a world where you are on the commuter train home and an agent is working on a new episode to watch that night. Maybe starring Prad Bit.

Anyone actually creating their own personal entertainment at the moment?

EDIT: Economically this was quite stupid... Token cost was ~$25. With a subscription this barely ate up a single 5 hour window of usage, but, on an API cost basis this was sort of ridiculous to replace a free mobile game...

4 points | by TomEleff 3 hours ago

2 comments

  • vunderba 2 hours ago
    Wrt entertainment I think we're still pretty far off. You have to do quite a bit of handholding (particularly maintaining coherence across multiple minutes of video) so its mostly the hobbyists that are making stuff right now. Minimax H3 was a big step forward in the open-weight world though with its ability to do ref2vid.

    However with agentic coding, I think we're already seeing a pretty big resurgence in owning your own tools.

    I've already created bespoke versions of many pieces of software to tweak them exactly to my liking (tabbed text editor, a graphical diff tool, screencaster, etc).

    https://mordenstar.com/other/my-tool-shed

  • bix6 2 hours ago
    I made a workout app that saves me $100/mo. It’s honestly better than what I had before. Although I have one sound bug I / Claude cannot figure out.

    I did start working on a gin rummy game to replace an app but the apps free so less motivation (even though it’s probably selling my data).

    I have dreams of making a few simple games but time is hard to find.

    [-]
    • TomEleff 1 hour ago
      Yeah, can't speak to the genie creating anything novel, but making a riff on an existing game was quite simple.

      We have talked about the workout app idea as well, also a gardening app (like when to plant, when to re-seed based on your zone), and a recipe app (like what is in season that you should buy along with recipes for those in-season ingredients).