Building a Mini-Town Simulator

In this hands-on episode of AI Native Dev, Simon Maple and Joe Holdcroft go head-to-head in a “vibe coding relay” challenge—building a tiny town simulator from scratch using AI-powered dev tools BASE44 and Bolt.new. With only 10 minutes, vague prompts, and no prep, they put these rapid-prototyping tools to the test. Simon leans into SimCity nostalgia while Joe battles ghost-town bugs and infinite money glitches. Hosted by Macey Baker, the episode dives deep into AI-assisted UI generation, event simulation, and how far these tools can really go with minimal human input. Part 2 continues next week with Cursor and Windsurf as Simon and Joe swap codebases to iterate on each other’s AI-born towns.

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