---
title: "Rebuilding Taipan! with an AI Pair Programmer in PHP"
url: https://www.exakat.io/rebuilding-taipan-with-an-ai-pair-programmer-in-php/
date: 2026-09-06
modified: 2026-09-06
lang: en
author: "dams"
description: "Rebuilding Taipan! with an AI Pair Programmer in PHP Taipan! was one of the games that hooked me on computers. My brother and I would play it on the Apple..."
categories:
  - "Code auditing"
tags:
  - "AI"
  - "game"
  - "php"
word_count: 1754
---

# Rebuilding Taipan! with an AI Pair Programmer in PHP

# Rebuilding Taipan! with an AI Pair Programmer in PHP

Taipan! was one of the games that hooked me on computers. My brother and I would play it on the Apple ][c bitmap font and the original's line-drawing art still aren't ported: a reminder that "faithful clone" has a visual dimension too, and it's the one still outstanding.

## Dogfooding as the real division of labor

The pattern that emerged: AI was fast and reliable at mechanical porting: reconciling sources, adding a new mechanic once specified, keeping the implementation clean enough to sail through static analysis at the strictest settings. What it couldn't do was tell me the pirate encounter rate felt wrong, or that a status line was truncating, or that a fight was tedious rather than tense. That took playing.

This is dogfooding in miniature, and it's a discipline that professional teams already know the value of. Using your own product is one of the most reliable ways to surface the problems a spec review never will. What this project made obvious is how much more that matters once AI is doing a large share of the implementation. The bottleneck didn't disappear, it moved: from writing the code to actually using the thing you built.

## Playing as work

There's a strange side effect to using play as your QA process: at some point, finding a bug stops being a happy accident and starts being the point of the session. You end up running two modes at once. Playing to enjoy the game, and playing to break it. And those two modes aim at different targets. That's a slightly schizophrenic way to spend an evening with a game you loved as a kid, and it's worth naming as a real cost of this workflow, not just a funny anecdote.

## Where this could go with Taipan! 2026 on PHP?

Where could this go next? First, it is playable, so get your PHP, [clone the repository](https://github.com/dseguy/taipan) and run `php bin/taipan`. Have fun! Report bugs, submit PR, etc.

Some of it is easy and mostly cosmetic: more goods, or different ones to avoid explaining that Opium is the best good to trade at the next family dinner, more ports, more flavor, larger warehouses. I actually added a feature where the Hong Kong shipbuilding company offers to upgrade the warehouse by 10000 more unit. I can now buy enough Silk to have the entire production since prehistory in my warehouse. And sell it next month.

Some of it is more ambitious: a networked version where several Taipans trade in the same world at once, or an economy with real constraints instead of infinite cargo moving between randomly fluctuating prices. It is quite astounding to realize that the whole mechanics of the game was built on random numbers: for prices, for events, etc. Not a single real life impact of flooding a city with enough Arms to start a revolution.

There's probably real room in the market for games in this register: simple, old-school shapes, but richer and more modern underneath than what 1982 hardware could support. Taipan! was built around the constraints of its era. Rebuilding it in 2026 is a chance to ask which of those constraints were the game, and which were just the Apple II.