Netshell – A 90s Unix hacking simulator with AI-powered NPCs

3 pointsposted 12 hours ago
by livespx

2 Comments

livespx

12 hours ago

Hey HN, I'm building Netshell, a single-player hacking simulation set in the late 90s (1997-2001). You play as a hacker navigating the early internet era - dot-com bubble, Y2K paranoia, corporate espionage.

  What makes it different:

  - Authentic CDE/Motif desktop environment
  - Real terminal with actual UNIX commands (ls, cat, ssh, nmap, etc.)
  - AI NPCs powered by local LLMs running on your machine
  - NPCs remember conversations and have persistent state
  - Multi-pass pipeline that prevents hallucinations through citation-grounded generation

  The AI system was the hardest part. We wrote a paper on how we prevent NPCs from making things up: https://beyondlogiclabs.com/devlog/papers/npc-pipeline/