Opus 5 burns 690M tokens to make a game; GPT-5.6 replicates it for $5

A user named Vyom created a watercraft racing game called INK TIDE using Anthropic's Opus 5 with a single 2000-word prompt and one-shot generation. The game features American cartoon style, retro arcade racing, with complete countdown, lap and ranking systems, and a unified street-racing dashboard UI. The prompt, which reads like a full requirement document, uses Vite, TypeScript, and Three.js, with all assets generated by code. It includes a detailed multi-agent workflow: a shared architecture is defined, then the project is split among sub-agents for water, cartoon rendering, boat physics, AI opponents, character animation, audio-visual systems, and performance, each with restricted file modifications. A visual review sub-agent acts as a quality inspector, iterating until screenshots pass review. Another user, Anul Agarwal, replicated a similar game using GPT-5.6 in Codex for about $5, using two prompts and a team of agents: GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra as the main agent and GPT-5.6 Luna Max as sub-agents. The replica is visually rougher in water details, character rendering, and overall consistency. The $5 cost is an estimate from subscription quota usage, not API billing. The original game's NPC opponents are intentionally weak, with parameters hardcoded to allow easy wins.