Grand Theft Auto VI is finally set to come out this November, after being in development for roughly a decade. For many fans, the wait has felt even longer considering Grand Theft Auto V first came out in 2013.
Now, one AI startup founder apparently can’t wait any longer, so he’s trying to vibe code his own version.
“Day 1 of building GTA 6. Still feels fake typing that out,” wrote 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 post included a short clip of the game, which on day one mostly consisted of a 3D blue oval moving and jumping around some gray blocks.
Xu seems to be pretty sincere about the effort. He has been posting updates every day since the original post and has even shared the code repository on GitHub. Still, it does make you wonder how much time this project is taking away from his day job as the founder of Hyperecho, a startup that helps companies deploy “AI employees.”
“The goal: beat the real GTA 6 to launch. Ambitious, probably stupid, doing it anyway,” wrote Xu.
The project appears to have been inspired by a post from another AI startup founder and investor.
“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,’” wrote Matt Shumer in a post reposted by Xu.
Basically, the idea is to see whether Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, a safer public version of the company’s more advanced Mythos model, could vibe code a GTA-caliber video game.
Vibe coding is a relatively new approach where developers rely heavily on AI assistants to generate and debug code using natural language prompts.
Some high-profile tech founders are fond of the approach. Jack Dorsey vibe coded at least two apps last year. Meanwhile, OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, who coined the term, has said that using AI agents is “net unhelpful.”
Still, on day two Xu posted a video showing a much more human-looking character running around an urban landscape, though he admitted it was still far from perfect.
“The agent built downtown LA skyscrapers, which is a problem, because this is supposed to be Florida,” Xu wrote. “Also I’ve burned 33% of my 20x weekly usage in one day. So that clock is ticking.”
By today’s update, the game included NPCs walking around, cars driving on roads, and even weapons.
It’ll be interesting to see how far Xu and his collaborators can take the project. Their deadline is still months away, unless Rockstar delays the game yet again.
