I’ve seen a lot of things built with AI this year. The one that made me cry was a game about killing cockroaches. I grew up in an apartment in China with lots of cockroaches when I was young. My mom turned it into a game: every month, we competed on who killed more. I didn’t know we were poor. I knew the score, and it was always close. Years later, I watched Life Is Beautiful and understood what she’d done. To protect a child from the difficult reality of the surrounding then. Last week I told that story at dinner to a customer, Joe Piazza. Telling the story almost made me cry. The next morning he emailed me an HTML file. “Open it in your browser.” It was the game. Me vs Mom. Pick a room, pick a weapon: slipper, newspaper, frying pan. Joe built it in one evening. A year ago that would have stayed a dinner story. Now it’s a thing you can play. I laughed. Then I cried. It is grotesque, it is beautiful, and it's such a gift only possible in this day and age. Then I beat mom. Took me more than twenty years.