Chirp Pong
- ID
- 35999
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 16 Oct 2026, 3:47 AM
- Fetched
- 16 Oct 2026, 4:50 AM
- Provider
- Simon Willison
- Category
- developer-ai
- Original URL
- https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/15/chirp-pong/
- Source URL
- https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/
Summary
- Score
- 6.0
- Created
- 16 Oct 2026, 4:51 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_codersai_agent_users
What happened
Simon Willison published Chirp Pong on 15 Oct 2026, a two-player pong-like browser game where two separate phones run static HTML and exchange game state via microphone-detectable audio chirps. He says the feasibility test appears to work, and the game adds graphical and gameplay twists beyond pong. The tool was built with Claude Opus 5.5 Extra in Claude Code.
Why it matters
Builders can treat this as a concrete pattern for phone-to-phone local multiplayer without a server or WebRTC: encode state as audio and decode with the Web Microphone API, but expect constraints around proximity, microphone permission, and noisy environments. It is also a useful data point for using Claude Code/Claude Opus 5.5 Extra to rapidly prototype unusual browser APIs; there is no Malaysia or Southeast Asia angle in the source.
Discussion angle
Where would audio-chirp networking beat WebRTC or Bluetooth for local multiplayer demos, and what breaks first: background noise, latency, or phone speaker/mic placement?