Tower Defense Showdown

Episode 1 sets the stage. Scott — the tinkerer with nearly forty years around computers but no programming résumé — picks Claude Opus and the most expensive route to a working build. Mayson, who has never written a line of code in his life, takes Sonnet and bets that mid-tier reasoning can carry a complete beginner across the finish line. Devin, tech-literate but not a coder, draws Haiku — the cheapest, fastest model on the team — and goes for volume over depth. Each one gets exactly five prompts to ship a complete tower defense game. The catch: the games must be playable in a browser, all genre fundamentals must be present, and the cost of every prompt is tracked. Whoever ships the most fun game at the lowest cost wins bragging rights for the season opener. More importantly: we find out whether AI coding tools really deliver for non-programmers, or just for engineers who already know what they're doing.

3-person · 5 prompts each

ScottOpus

MaysonSonnet

DevinHaiku