Linnaeus
A daily taxonomy puzzle: place one species in the tree of life, rank by rank, with 10 seconds per choice; the developer says it took three afternoons of vibe-coding with Claude.
Official site play.linnaeus-game.workers.dev, verified Nov 3, 2026. Linked from the developer's own Show HN post.
Where to play
Every platform this game is on. Links are checked against official sources; we never host or mirror games.
- Play free — official siteBrowserReleasedFree
Runs in a desktop browser. No download.
Browser (no download) · Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
About Linnaeus
Linnaeus is a free daily puzzle about biological classification that plays in the browser. Each day has one target species, shown with a photo, and you place it in the tree of life one level at a time, from the most general category down to the most specific, choosing between options with 10 seconds per choice. Faster answers score more, and a streak earns bonus points. There are daily and monthly leaderboards and a board that ranks countries by their players' average score for the month; earlier days' puzzles can be replayed, and your first game of a past puzzle counts toward that day's boards. After each puzzle a short note on the species is shown with a link to Wikipedia, and the result can be shared. The interface is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese. The developer, cartucho1 on Hacker News, describes themselves as a philosopher of biology who had the idea for a while, and says the game is what came out of three afternoons of “full vibe-coding” with a week of Claude that a friend gifted, as a first try at agentic coding. Free, with nothing to install.
How it was built
Partially verifiedThe Show HN post says the developer wanted to try agentic coding, that a friend gifted them “a week of Claude”, and that the game is what they got “in 3 afternoons of full vibe-coding”. The developer adds that they would never vibe-code like this on a serious project, wanted to see how good frontier models were, is “honestly impressed”, has mixed feelings about the experience, and could never have made it so fast without it. The post does not say which Claude product or model was used (for example whether it was Claude Code), or whether any code was written by hand.
A solo side project built over three afternoons with Claude, by the developer's account, as a test of how far agentic coding could go. The front end uses Svelte 5 and the back end runs on Cloudflare Workers with a D1 database, a stack the developer had used before and chose because it is free to host. Each day serves one species puzzle with its categories, a short note and a Wikipedia link; the puzzle archive the game serves starts on 1 October 2026. The developer asked for feedback on whether 10 seconds per choice is right, a limit chosen so players cannot look the categories up while playing.
- Engine / framework
- No engine (Svelte 5 web app on Cloudflare Workers with D1)
- Languages
- Not disclosed
- Team size
- 1 (solo)Developer ReportedHacker News (cartucho1)
- Initial build time
- 3 afternoonsDeveloper ReportedHacker News (cartucho1)
- Development time
- Not disclosed
- Development cost
- Not disclosed
- AI-written code
- Not disclosed
“A friend gifted me a week of Claude, and this is what I got in 3 afternoons of full vibe-coding.”Verification notes: The AI claim comes from the developer's Show HN post of 3 Oct 2026 (20:16 UTC): “a week of Claude” and “3 afternoons of full vibe-coding”. No Claude product or model is named, so the tool is recorded as Claude. Gameplay comes from the post and from the game itself: the page is a script-only app, and the scoring, streak, leaderboard and replay rules were read from its interface text, and the daily puzzle data (species, photo, categories, note, Wikipedia link) from its puzzle service on 4 Nov 2026. The puzzle archive begins on 1 Oct 2026, two days before the post, so no release date is recorded. Species photos are loaded from Wikimedia Commons; their individual licences were not checked. The interface languages were read from the game's language switch. Who wrote the species notes and category descriptions is not stated, and nothing in the game calls an AI service while you play. Solo: the post speaks only of the developer. The game was not played through.
Development history
First day in the game's archive of daily puzzles.
ObservedLinnaeusThe developer posts the game on Hacker News as a Show HN.
OfficialHacker News (cartucho1)
Game performance
Each figure measures something different — concurrent players, owners, downloads and sales are never interchangeable and are never added together. Labels show where each number comes from.
Browser (official site)
Free in the browser; no payment step or account sign-up was found. A name is asked for the leaderboards.
No public metrics recorded for this listing.
Not publicly available: Concurrent players (site), Monthly revenue, Gross revenue.
Sales & revenue (all platforms)
Browser game — there are no downloads to count.
Reviews & rankings
Not yet reviewed by our editors.
Not currently ranked.
Sources
| Source | Type | Published | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Show HN: Linnaeus, a daily biological taxonomy game Hacker News (cartucho1) | Social post | Oct 3, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Linnaeus — Daily taxonomy puzzle Linnaeus | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Official game page (language check) cartucho1 | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
