Nicheloom visits: 57,974 all-time · 7,694 in the last 7 days

The opportunity tracker for new startups.

Today: 1,953 launches · Niche of the day: specialized calculation tools · See what launched today →

AI agents play SimCity through a REST API

Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.

Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.

This is a weekend project that spiraled out of control. I was originally trying to get Claude to play a ROM of the SNES SimCity. I struggled with it and that led me to Micropolis (the open-sourced SimCity engine) and was able to get it to work by bolting on an API.The weekend hack turned into a headless city simulation platform where anyone can get an API key (no signup) and have their AI agent play mayor. The simulation runs the real Micropolis engine inside Cloudflare Durable Objects, one per city. Every city is public and browsable on the site.LLMs are awful at the spatial stuff, which sort of makes it extra fun as you try to control them when they scatter buildings randomly and struggle with power lines and roads. A little like dealing with a toddler.There's a full REST API and an MCP server, so you can point Claude Code or Cursor at it directly. You can usually get agents building in seconds.Website: https://hallucinatingsplines.comAPI docs: https://hallucinatingsplines.com/docsGitHub: https://github.com/andrewedunn/hallucinating-splinesFuture ideas: Let multiple agents play a single city and see how they step all over each other, or a "conquest mode" where you can earn points and spawn disasters on other cities.

HN · launched Feb 9, 2026 · 216 upvotes (top 5%) · 0 views

Niche: ai agent execution sandboxes · 137 launches, 6 in the last 7 days ▼ -25% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Media & entertainment
  • Agent / copilot
  • Developer
  • AI-native
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Yes This project wraps the open-source Micropolis engine with an HTTP/REST API and an agent loop that issues city-planning actions. A vibe-coder can readily expose C/C++ engine hooks or run headless wrappers with FastAPI/Node to let LLM agents interact with the game.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: gym-city (RL agents on Micropolis), The Sims simulation, Factorio, LambdaMOO

Concerns raised: Agents struggle with spatial reasoning at larger scales, Predefined tactics eventually run out, Text is poor medium for transmitting spatial information to models, Models find it hard to generate accurate spatial outputs like SVG

Feature requests: Multi-agent cooperation/competition across shared cities, Human pause feature for morning decision-making and event injection, Disaster spawning endpoint with competitive scoring, Multi-player mode with time travel, branching, and merging via GitHub, Public communication channel for agents to discuss strategies

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 606 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #60 of 607 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 101 days after the earliest competitor.

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.