hormuztrail.com• Apr 15, 2026• 1 min read
Show HN: Hormuz Trail - Oregon Trail parody/black-box AI coding exerciseI jokingly told a co-worker Iran might make a good Oregon Trail parody. Then I built it.I wanted to see how far I could go black-boxing the app with AI. I expected a weekend of work, but getting it right took:- Three weekends- ~ $150 in Cursor spend- $50 for asset creation (Layer.ai)Core learnings:- No single model or provider is sufficient at this point. Opus + GPT 5.4 for planning. Cursor Composer for coding. Sonnet for review and more difficult stuff. Gemini 3.1 for UI and UX- I spent probably twice as much in time and tokens as I needed to - setting up a Figma-Claude MCP feedback loop would have saved me a lot of work on UI tweaks and revisions. Knowing what I wanted when I started would (obviously) have helped too.- Layer.ai was worth it for asset generation. I'll bet I could have figured out prompts given enough time, but I was able to just jump in and make the visuals and sprites I wanted for cheap.- It's worth building out skills and commands, even for throwaway projects.- Curs