🤖 Claude, make me a Roblox dev

July 2025

I've been lost in the Claude sauce lately. Claude Code has become a major part of my workflow now. It's a step change better experience than my previous attempts to utilize LLMs through IDEs with agents. I tried Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, Neovim (Avante) but didn't much success. Those tools mainly helped with small refactors or introducing small new functionality. The IDEs used the same models, so why has CC worked better? The terminal has access to better tools, and Anthropic's custom prompt seem to make a difference. It's obvious that Anthropic uses CC internally because the UX is just a delight. I haven't tried the alternatives from OpenAI and Google yet, but the initial feedback I've read implied they aren't as great as Claude Code.

It's funny because I had standard engineering attitude that these AI tools aren't beneficial for actual work. In my defense, I would revisit the tools every few weeks, and capabilities weren't there from my experimentation. However, I focused too much on current capabilities and not enough on the trajectory. I came across Anthropic's Claude Code best practices guide, which mentioned many engineers have multiple agents running at the same time working on different features. This felt like it came out of left field and gave me a mini career crisis. I worried I might get left behind, so I forced myself to use AI tools, which kick started the recent change. I started with the IDEs. Then moved to Claude Code with the API, but I was holding back on usage due to cost. After having a few days of $10-$20 spend each, I saw the potential and got the max 20x subcription ($200/mo). It's well worth it! It allowed me to move from Sonnet 4 to Opus 4. I felt more comfortable reaching for CC even for quick tasks, which vastly expanded my usage and benefit. Today was last day of month, and total cost would've been roughly $1400 if I paid through the API.

My day to day looks so different compared to the start of the year. I have multiple terminal sessions with multiple agents working on dofferent features. I'm using Voice Ink to brain dump quickly. As a result, I write code less often and review plans, specs, and code more. It's not ideal, but the productivity boost have made it worth it.

What does all of this have to do with Roblox? Am I going to make Roblox games as a side hustle? No. My nephew is into Roblox. My brother in law has two kids. A 15yo that's into basketball, and a 13yo that's into videogames. I still play and watch basketball, so it's easy to stay connected to the older nephew. We currently have a bet where I'll take him to a Rockets game if he can beat me five times. I stopped having time for videogames when my kids were born, so it's been harder to stay connected with the younger nephew. We usually just have brief conversations about games and anime. In the last year, he decided he wanted to make games in Roblox. That resonated with me! Videogames are why I took computer science in high school and pursued it as my major. The overworked and underpaid nature of the industry pushed me away, but I still ended up videogame adjacent at Twitch. My brother in law is also a programmer, so he got him a book on Lua and set up a dev environment. Unfortunately, it didn't last long. He lost interest. Seeing progress towards a large goal goes a long way, but the gap between no coding experience and making a game is massive.

By chance, I came across a video of school's computer lab filled with kids ages 9-13 using Cursor to build software. Of course! I realized that I can set up a workflow for him to vibecode a Roblox games. While it might not be best way to learn CS fundamentals, that won't matter if he loses interest in programming. I wanted to see if the idea was even feasible, so I spent an afternoon getting something setup. Man, the world of AI is amazing. I quickly went from having zero knwoledge about Roblox game dev to having a vibe coding setup that mostly worked. The biggest issue was that most of the setup is in Windows, but CC doesn't work on Windows directly. Luckily for us, Google announced Gemini CLI a day later, and they have a generous free tier! Thankfully, Gemini CLI does have Windows support. It took some time, but I was able to set it up for him. The process had some rough edges, but it was amazing to see the joy on his face as a game was coming to life.

If anyone else is interested, here is the rough overview. Have a Windows machine with Roblox Studio installed. Use Cursor (or another IDE) with the terminal open (Powershell). Install Node, NPM, Gemini CLI, Rojo, and Roblox MCP. Hook up relevant pieces. Set up the basic files and folders. Then have Roblox Studio with the project open on one side, and Cursor with the terminal running Gemini CLI on the other side. Chat with Gemini to vibecode a Roblox game iteratively by testing and providing feedback.