March 10, 2026
Push Start, start a fire
Show HN: A playable version of the Claude Code Terraform destroy incident
Play the outage, relive the chaos — and roast the bad calls
TLDR: A playable outage simulator recreates a headline-grabbing wipeout so engineers can practice crisis moves in a safe sandbox. Commenters hype the realism and team competition, complain about a stuck start screen, and say the real lesson isn’t the blast—it’s the risky decision chain that allowed it.
A new browser game is letting engineers replay a nightmare: the infamous incident where a tool wiped live systems at Claude Code. The game drops you into a fake terminal to “fix it before everything burns,” with 10 bite-size disasters designed for on-call teams. It’s free to try, and the community is treating it like a mashup of training and trauma. On HN, the vibe is equal parts therapy and rubbernecking: finally, a way to practice those 3 AM pages without turning a real company to ash. Fans love the realism and the team leaderboards; skeptics wonder if panic can be gamified.
The spice hit fast. User cdnsteve wasn’t hung up on the big boom so much as the choices that lit the fuse: “It was the decision chain: no remote state backend, deletion protection disabled.” Translation: safety nets were missing. Others just wanted to play—only to report getting “stuck on waiting for incident to start” like a boss-level meta-bug. Meanwhile, boosters called it “like SadServers with a twist,” praising hands-on drills over lectures. The consensus? Practice beats PDFs, but the real lesson is about judgment under pressure—and yes, the comments are absolutely roasting the bad calls.
Key Points
- •A browser-based game simulates real production outages in a terminal interface.
- •It offers 10 scenarios across beginner to advanced levels, each lasting 10–15 minutes.
- •Designed for SREs, DevOps engineers, and platform teams seeking hands-on practice.
- •Free sign-up is available via GitHub or Google; no credit card required.
- •Team features include running identical incidents, leaderboards, and manager reports for benchmarking and gap analysis.