David M. Berry
"Welcome to my Island," Calypso.
"To the first writers who spoke against the old style of authoritative rhetoric, the problem of the author's voice in fiction was extremely complicated. [Henry] James's Prefaces, for example, those shrewd and indispensable explorations into the writer's craft offer no easy reduction of technique to a simple dichotomy of telling versus showing, no pat rejection of all but James's own methods. And, in fact, James's own methods were surprisingly varied. The persistent enemy for James was intellectual and artistic sloth, not any particular way of telling or showing a story," Wayne C. Booth
"The only law that binds the novelist throughout, whatever course he is pursuing, is the need to be consistent on some plan, to follow the principle he has adopted," Percy Lubbock
Over the past six weeks I have been experimenting with a computable literary artefact that explores the trajectory and limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) through vibe coding a large-scale vector-medium artefact. The aim was to not only explore scale limitations on a complex programming project, but also to create a literary object in and of itself which is particular to the vector medium I theorise.
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| The in-game browser Netscape |
Nostos, the resultant game/world/object utilises the aesthetic of early web ecosystems (including
GeoCities,
Netscape, 1990s laptop environment and mobile phone) to create a dissonance between the user-facing "game" interface and the backend code. Code is always present in differing abstractions and access points throughout the world it presents, not just within the game but also through the web presentation and even the GitHub repository itself. We might say that the project requires the "reader" to become a critical code studies investigator, bypassing the frictionless, synthesised answers of the in-world machines to uncover the fragmented, human truth hidden in HTML comments, programming code and encrypted scripts. It is a study in what we might call "vector love," cognitive anaesthesia, and the fragile nature of digital memory.
The world/game itself now over 208,000 lines of source, including nearly 85,000 lines of executable/programmatic code (!!), and so far has taken 17.7 billion tokens to create. In ~6 weeks, costs (approx) are
- Non-API token cost: £209,881 (i.e. if one were paying on the go)
- API costs: £24,237 (if one were paying on an API tier)
- Real cost: £142 (the cost I paid through the Claude Max subscription)
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| The game Nostos, a 2D isometric world. |
This discrepancy between the amount of tokens used (17.7 billion, yes billion), and the costs, is interesting in itself, but I think this raises questions about the underlying political economy of frontier AI companies, but also about the potential of this abundance of compute and token production. It seems like software (or code production) is becoming untethered from the living labour that originally was required to create it. Not only does this raise questions about the future direction of software engineering and programming itself, but it also suggests that code might become relatively unlimited, subject to the token costs. I asked Gemini Pro and ChatGPT Pro (LLMs) to convert the game into the kinds of human labour time that would traditionally have been required. Gemini estimates 7.5–15 person-years of conventional production; GPT-5.6 estimates 16–24 person-years. Against the observed 301 hours of human labour, these imply respectively about 44–88x and 94–140x compression of human production time. What is becoming available is on-tap code production or symbolic production capacity. Production becomes abundant, but judgement, verification, integration and attention remain scarce.
GEMINI PRO (~5–6 people × 1.5–2.5 years → approximately 8–15 person-years)
- The Math: At a generous 100 lines a day, 84,822 lines of logic and framework code represents roughly 850 developer-days.
- The Team: For a team of two full-time programmers working 220 days a year, this is about 2 years of pure coding time.
- If an indie game studio of 5 to 6 people (2 programmers, 2 writers, 1 designer, 1 producer/QA) were fully funded to build NostOS manually, it would take them approximately 1.5 to 2.5 years of full-time, 40-hour work weeks (Gemini Pro, 22 Aug 2026).
CHATGPT 5.6 Sol (~8–12 people × ~2 years → approximately 16–24 person-years)
- A conventional production process would plausibly have required a software team of around 8–12 people working for perhaps two years, or somewhere in the region of 16–24 person-years of labour. NostOS was instead produced through approximately 301 hours of human interaction with generative models over 48 days.
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| The Lean Studio (Gemini Pro, 44–88x human-labour compression rate) vs the larger production team (GPT-5.6 Sol, 94–140x compression rate) |
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| The "braincode" run by robots in-world which can be refunctioned in the ML programming language |
I created
Nostos in 301 hours (40 working days for a single person). The work (so far!) remains incomplete. So far, to give just some of the highlights, it contains a fully runnable version of ELIZA (based on Anthony Hay's JavaScript version), a
complete implementation (!) of the ML programming language which is self-standing and fully compliant with Standard ML, large selection of objects that can be used, manipulated or crafted, a walkman, for playing the cassette tapes littered over the island, and a mobile phone (supporting in-game 2FA). There are also three types of terminal (two fictional terminals, one for the AIs and one for the RON resistance movement, and the other a simulation of Unix v7, which runs ML for programming and pico for editing), an emulation of
Netscape Navigator (used by the resistance),
Internet Explorer (used by the AIs) and many other software objects, and an in-game fictional World Wide Web with over 2000 pages, which hold game lore, general information and the means to refunction (Benjamin) the robots via the ML programming language to edit their "braincode". If that's not enough there is, in-game, a functional simulation of the NeXTSTEP operating system.
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| NeXTSTEP simulation running in-world |
The world itself is made up of five islands, and a separate "Backspace" where the AIs have banished most of human culture. Each of the four main islands are controlled by different AIs of differing attitudes towards humans with the first, Calypso, being the first AI whose island the player washes upon.
The form of this vector media artefact is amorphous and overlapping, both machinic procedure and literature, code and world-exploration, a kind of gamic irrealism.
Notes
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| Calculated by Claude Opus 5 (High) |
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| Calculated by Claude Opus 5 (High) |
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