A playable browser tribute to Elite (1984), built entirely by Claude as an 'Open Vibe Code' experiment
Harmless is a love letter to Elite (1984), recreated for the browser. All 2,048 worlds of the original are here across eight galaxies — each with the same name, government, prices, and description as in 1984, generated with the original's own arithmetic. Lave is still a rich agricultural dictatorship at tech level 5. You trade, jump, fight pirates, fly wireframe Cobras and Anacondas, and dock with the spinning Coriolis station — the hardest part of the game, just like the original. It plays on a phone, saves in your browser, and needs no account.
What makes it a story is how it was built — and how it's being developed. In the Show HN post, the author wrote: "I've had Claude (and other models) building this for me... It's an 'Open Vibe Code' project." The GitHub README (atomic14/harmless) is even more blunt: "I have not looked at the code. I have no intention of looking at it. All the work has been done by Claude and other coding agents."
The experiment extends to maintenance: no pull requests are accepted. Instead, contributors open an issue describing what they want, and the author periodically points Claude at the issues and sees what it does. The result is already "very playable" — trading, contracts, missions, convoys, and pirates that hunt you.