How it was made: in a pull request adding Spinlings to the lappemic/awesome-ai-built-games list on October 6, 2026, the developer wrote that Claude was used to build the original TypeScript creature and battle engine, the interface and the Cloudflare Worker and D1 database backend, and that Codex assisted with later interface and test changes. The GitHub repository is consistent with both claims: 18 of the 76 commits on its main branch, all dated October 3, 2026, carry a "Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5" line, and nine of its branches are named with a "codex/" prefix. In the same pull request, the developer said the game runs on a custom TypeScript engine with no AI calls while it's being played, and that the share of AI-written code hasn't been measured. The repository was created on October 2, 2026, and version 0.1.0 was released on October 3; the latest tagged release, 0.2.16, came out on October 6. The code is under the MIT license.
Spinlings
- Claude Code (terminal)
- Claude Desktop (Code tab)
Summary
Spinlings is a free, open-source creature card game by GitHub user 416rehman that runs inside Claude Code, Anthropic's coding agent. According to the project's README, once one of Claude's turns has run for about 20 seconds, wild pixel creatures may show up in a narrow strip above the prompt, and the player's three-card team battles them automatically; pressing 1 when a special move triggers makes it hit harder. Winning a fight can add the creature to the player's collection, and no two cards are alike, since each is generated with its own traits, genes and coloring. Beyond battling, players can merge two cards into a hybrid, swap or sell cards with others, give them away, take on other players' saved teams and compete on leaderboards in the online world hosted at spinlings.dev. An offline mode keeps everything on the player's own machine. The game installs as a Claude Code plugin with two commands and also runs in the Code tab of Claude Desktop. The README says it never calls the model, so it doesn't spend the player's Claude tokens.
How it was made
Sources
Details come from the developer's own posts and pages credited below.
- 416rehman (GitHub): spinlings: Tiny pixel creatures that battle above your prompt while Claude works (README)
- Spinlings: Spinlings official site and install instructions
- 416rehman (GitHub): Add Spinlings to Simulation and Strategy (developer's pull request to awesome-ai-built-games, October 6, 2026)
- spinlings on GitHub: Commit history
- spinlings on GitHub: Releases
- lappemic/awesome-ai-built-games (GitHub): Awesome AI-Built Games list (where we found it)
Image: Spinlings
Written in our own words; quotes are marked and credited. How we report
