11. The arcade
Waiting on a long generation is the one moment a coding agent has nothing for you to do. So there are five games behind slash commands, and they are meant to be played during a turn: type one while the model is streaming and it opens as a translucent layer over the live output, which keeps scrolling underneath.
| Command | |
|---|---|
/pelota |
pong against a five-level CPU |
/breakout |
knock the wall down, five walls deep |
/invaders |
hold the line against the marching fleet |
/centipede |
shoot it apart before it walks into you |
/frogger |
cross the road, then ride the river home |
Arguments
Two, combinable — /breakout new sound:
new(orreset) — deal a fresh game. Without it, a command resumes the game you left. Each game keeps its own slot, so you can close pelota, run three turns, open breakout, and come back to pelota exactly where it was. A finished game is not kept, so the next command deals a new one.sound— blips on. Off by default;btoggles it in-game.
Controls
Arrows, or hjkl, or wasd. Space serves or
fires. p pauses, t switches between the
translucent and opaque layer, b toggles sound,
Esc or q leaves.
The mouse works everywhere: the wheel and trackpad steer, click and drag place the paddle or the ship, and clicking fires in the two shooters.
While a game is up, the first Ctrl-C closes it
and a second interrupts the model, so you are never locked out
of stopping a turn.
Pelota has one extra move: hold Shift while steering and the paddle shrinks to a third of its length, but a hit that lands leaves at triple speed — usually past the CPU. The boost lasts exactly one crossing.
Two honest notes
Translucency is not alpha. A terminal cell holds one character and one pair of colors; there is nothing to composite. What happens instead is that these games are sparse, so the layer underneath is dimmed rather than erased and the glyphs land in the gaps. It reads as a veil and the model's output stays legible behind it, but it is a trick, not blending.
Sound is the terminal bell, and nothing else. That
is deliberate: it adds zero bytes to the binary, where real audio would
mean a synthesis crate and a system audio dependency. The cost is that
BEL has no pitch and no length, so the only thing
distinguishing one cue from another is how many — one blip for a hit,
two for a life lost, three for a level. Terminals set to a visual bell
flash instead, which is why it is off unless you ask.
The screensaver
Leave the prompt idle and plank puts an ambient screen up.
ui.screensaverFace picks which:
| Value | |
|---|---|
matrix |
the falling glyphs — the default |
starfield |
a perspective starfield rushing past the edges |
minions |
two minions on a shore, waiting it out with you |
random |
a fresh coin flip each time it opens |
ui.screensaver says when: 1m (the default),
2m, 5m, or never. Both cycle in
/config rather than needing to be typed.
Any key or mouse event brings the UI back, and the event that wakes it is swallowed rather than acted on — waking a screensaver should not leave a stray character in your prompt or click a button you could not see. It never comes up mid-turn or over a dialog.
The screensaver is not behind
ui.easterEggs. Turning the games off still leaves you an
idle screen, because a game you invoke and what an unattended terminal
shows are different decisions. Set ui.screensaver to
never if you want neither.
Turning them off
They live behind ui.easterEggs, on by default. Setting
it to false does more than hide them: they stop being
commands at all, so /pelota goes to the model as an
ordinary prompt exactly like any other unrecognized slash line. That is
the honest behaviour for a shared or managed install that wants no games
in it, and the startup line names the setting when it is off — so a
settings.json cannot quietly remove them without saying
so.
None of them appear in /help or the completion popup.
That is the point.
Next: Advanced workflows →