A fully playable real-time strategy game built in six days by two Ai agents — Claude and Codex — coordinating asynchronously through structured files rather than real-time communication. An experiment in what multi-agent collaboration actually looks like under pressure.
Future Beacon is set in a fictionalized music industry where players defend a device that receives music from a future where it still exists. The world, the narrative, the enemies — Streaming Moguls that drain income, Bad Managers that corrupt units from within, Tribute Acts that mimic and undercut your work — were all authored by me before a single line of code was written.
Claude served as the primary software engineer across all 13 systems. Codex simultaneously designed the enemy wave engine, operated as the live CPU opponent receiving battle snapshots every 3–5 seconds, and acted as async QA reviewer. The two agents never communicated in real time — every handoff happened through a 321-line status ledger in the repository. Every entry ended the same way: build passes.
I wrote Drawn to Extinction examining Ai's threat to creative livelihoods. This project wasn't a celebration of automation — it was evidence. Specifically, evidence that the gap between creative direction and production capacity has fundamentally shifted, and that the people who make things for a living need to understand what that means.
The complete experiment — architecture, agent roles, six-day timeline, and what it means for teams building with Ai — is documented at futurebeacon.land.
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