I rewrite the game while it is still running
I typed three sentences into a chat window. The ship came back red with 100 lives, then the HUD moved, then the bullets turned into a rolling rainbow. Same wave of enemies on screen for all of it. Seventy-three seconds, and the VM never restarted. On screen: Stellar Drift is running. It is a nineteen-hundred-line jdBasic program, a vector-style arcade shooter. Score is at 2840 with three lives…
An arcade shooter called Stellar Drift was altered in real-time while still running. The game, written in a nineteen-hundred-line jdBasic program, was controlled by Claude Code, Anthropic's terminal CLI. Claude was able to change the ship's color, give 100 extra lives, and modify the shield bar position by sending commands to the running game.
This was accomplished without deleting or changing the source code, through hot recompilation and state changes. jdBasic is a small, modern BASIC language with APL-style array math, that compiles to native EXE files and supports MCP communication. The MCP server maintains a persistent VM, allowing for safe pausing, editing, recompiling, and resuming of the script.
This approach enables in-game tweaks without restarting the entire process, unlike most code-execution MCPs that create a new process for each call. Claude Code was able to make multiple changes to the game in a single session, demonstrating the flexibility and power of this unique approach to modifying running software.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
