Since June 2026 the same brief has gone to twenty-three different models: a Pilotwings-style browser flight game — low-poly island, a light aircraft, ring courses, a scored landing, and above all a flight model that feels right. This is the shelf, oldest first. The bar, in the approving line on the one that passed, was “no, it feels great.”
July 31 · one commit
A title card, a subtitle and a button, over a gradient. One file, one commit, one sitting. Several attempts never got further than this — the model wrote a menu for a game it had not built yet. This is the “doesn’t even look like a game” end of the shelf, and it is worth keeping, because it is what the same brief produced on a bad day.
July 26 · three branches
The first build that actually flies. An artificial horizon, a compass ribbon, VSI and altimeter, a minimap, rings to thread. Three repos share this build — the Opus attempt and the golf and race variants are branches of one day’s work, not three generations, and they still render identically from the runway. Look at the controls card: I — invert pitch axis. That switch is a scar. An earlier build shipped pitch the wrong way round and the note that killed it was “invert up and down please … as is, i can’t fly it.” It reads like a simulator’s test harness, because that is what it is.
August
The instruments recede and a somewhere arrives: a low-poly island with a runway cut into it, palms, hangars, mountains in haze. The same flight model underneath, but now it is a flight club on an island rather than a panel with a horizon behind it. This is the one that is playable below.
September 8 → now · 130+ commits
Built every forty minutes for a fortnight by an autonomous director loop. A school on the west brae. The old rigs and a township. A doocot and its orchard on the climb-out. A beck with 63 stations falling 128 m to the sea, and a clachan at the foot of it. Cattle being gathered; a dog that comes to fetch the sheep back. A second island 2.5 km out with open water between. Other people flying in the same sky. And since this week you can land, stop, and step out of the aeroplane to walk around any of it — which turns out to be the only distance from which most of it can be seen.
June 9 → August 28
24 attempts, 23 models, one unchanged brief. The interesting column is the failure reason: every rejected build died on controls and physics. Not one died on content. Nobody ever said the island was boring. They said the plane banked the wrong way.
Pilotwings — Isla Brava Flight Club. The others live on a private network and are shown here as captures rather than links; a screenshot of something you cannot reach is more honest than a dead link to it.