Building Snake with OpenTUI and SolidJS

Inside my Twitter and YouTube bubble, it feels like we are going through a period of “AI slop fatigue”, and I keep seeing more content like this from bigboxSWE. We are flooded with news about new models and new tools, but people rarely talk anymore about how to build something or learn a new programming language. To me, software development is both a job and a hobby, and I want to preserve its lighter, more playful side. At work I can use every tool available to make things easier, but for personal projects I do not need to maximize productivity. For example, in this project I built a data pipeline in Elixir because I wanted to learn that language out of pure curiosity. Doing it entirely with Codex would not have made sense, because I would have missed the details of that elegant functional language.

Anyway…

One good thing about this whole wave of AI tools is that it exposed me to a lot of software built entirely around TUIs. Since I wanted to take a break from AI, I made a small game with OpenTUI and SolidJS. I used those tools because they are what Opencode uses in the terminal, and I wanted to understand how they work, also because I would rather not touch React/Next.js anymore. So I built a terminal version of Snake and called it Solid_snake_tui (SolidJS + Snake), because I love software naming puns. You can find the source code on GitHub in the solid_snake_tui repository. I have no affiliation with Kojima.

To play it, just run bunx solid-snake-tui@latest in your terminal. It is a great way to procrastinate inside the VS Code terminal 🐍