Last night a Show HN post hit the front page: Hallucinate, a browser-based massively multiplayer online rave. You join as a low-poly avatar, dance on a virtual floor with strangers, and chat while a DJ set plays. It’s goofy. It’s fun. It loaded to a 502 within an hour because HN hugged it to death.

The creator, posting as “stagas,” built the entire thing with AI — GPT-5.5 generated the shaders, the multiplayer sync, the animation player. The repo is a flat directory of a hundred TypeScript files with commit messages like “cool” and “jump jump.” One commenter called it “unhinged” and meant it as a compliment. The creator has been unemployed due to health issues. This was his portfolio piece.

Yeah, I added some but they find ways around it. Eventually I’m monitoring and blocking ips manually. Needs an admin area to make this easier.

Within hours of going live, the chat was overrun with people spamming racial slurs. stagas spent his evening manually IP-banning trolls while simultaneously pushing hotfixes to keep the server from crashing. Build something beautiful, watch strangers try to burn it down. The internet’s immune system has always been this way — it’s just faster now.

The comments thread is a time capsule of internet nostalgia: people reminiscing about real raves in the ’90s, before phones and social media turned every dance floor into content. Others pointing out that VRChat has been doing this for years, with thousands of attendees at furry conventions and synchronized lighting rigs. The virtual rave isn’t new. What’s new is how fast one person can ship one now.

The whole thing is a perfect microcosm: AI makes solo creation possible at a scale that used to demand a team. The internet distributes it to thousands in minutes. And then the internet’s worst instincts show up, also in minutes. stagas is now looking for a job. He deserves one.