BLAMELESS

The pager goes off at 03:07, prod is down and nobody else is awake. You kubectl exec into production in person and terminate whatever is crashing it: ten incidents, four hosts, one root cause. It ends with a postmortem written from what you actually did.

How it was built

The author gave Claude Fable 5.2 one open-ended prompt (shown below): build a three.js shooter, with one try, at least 30 fps, and everything else the model's call. The story, look, weapons, soundtrack and tests were all chosen by the model. A second message ("deploy this, give it a domain, make stats and a leaderboard, make a public repo") produced the stats server, the deployment and the repository.

How it plays

Weapons are shell commands: kill -15, kill -9, grep -r and rm -rf. There is no ammo. Every weapon has a rate limit instead, and if you fire too long it answers 429. Rollback rewinds you three seconds, error budget included, and sudo charges up for a burst with no rate limits and +50% damage.

Controls & tips

• WASD + mouse move and aim, hold left mouse to fire, 1–4 / wheel switch weapons
• Space jump, Shift dash with brief invulnerability, Q / right mouse rollback, F sudo when charged
• ESC / P pause; the backtick key toggles the fps line
• On a phone you can watch the autopilot and read the leaderboard

This deployment can't be embedded, so Play Game opens it on the author's site in a new tab.

Credits

By Petyok, released under the MIT License.

The campaign

Ten incidents across four hosts, all leading back to one root cause. After each resolved incident you deploy one of three hotfixes (untested, straight to production), so your run builds up perks as you go. Dying restarts the current incident and keeps your hotfixes. Finish the campaign and you get a postmortem written from what you actually did, and the endless night shift unlocks.

Severity is the difficulty: SEV3 is chill, SEV2 normal, SEV1 hurts.

Weapons are shell commands

Key	Weapon
1	kill -15
2	kill -9
3	grep -r
4	rm -rf

There's no ammo. Each weapon has a rate limit instead: fire too long and it answers 429 until it cools down. Holstered weapons cool faster, so switching weapons is the core skill. Rotate through all four instead of holding one down.

Your error budget

• Health is your error budget. Coffee restores it, and each resolved incident gives some back.
• Rollback (Q or right mouse) rewinds you 3 seconds, error budget included. Use it right after a hit you didn't see coming.
• Dash (Shift) gives a moment of invulnerability.
• sudo (F), once charged, lifts all rate limits and adds 50% damage. Save it for the toughest fights.

Know your bugs

Enemy	What to know
Zombie processes	Dead, but not yet reaped
Fork bombs	Split when killed; clear the pieces before they multiply
Cron jobs	Fire when the clock hand reaches twelve; watch the hand
SYN flood	A flood of half-open connections
Race conditions	Kill both threads within two seconds or it doesn't count
Memory leaks	Grow until they OOM; kill them early
Heisenbugs	Move when you look at them
oom_reaper	The kernel's out-of-memory killer, as an enemy
legacy-billing-monolith.jar	Shielded by its dependencies

Leaderboard

Press L on the title screen. There's one board per severity plus one for the night shift, with your best run listed once. Type a handle to be shown. The same screen has world totals: how many engineers were paged, how many resolved it, and what kills people most.

Controls

Key	Action
WASD, mouse	Move, aim
Left mouse (hold)	Fire
1–4, wheel	Switch weapon
Space	Jump
Shift	Dash (brief invulnerability)
Q / right mouse	Rollback 3 s
F	sudo (when charged)
Esc / P	Pause; ` toggles the fps line

It needs a keyboard and mouse. On a phone you can watch the autopilot play and read the leaderboard.