Open Sauce — Crowd-Prompted Smash Melee Bots
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gf8OAHsQqxI
- Original title: Open Sauce 2026 | TheStandup
A Standup episode where Prime recaps Open Sauce 2026, the maker/science-YouTuber conference that filled the void left by Maker Faire. The centerpiece: a live main-stage event where 2,000 audience members prompted LLMs to write Python bots that played Super Smash Bros. Melee against each other, complete with a terrifying on-stage production bug that nearly killed the whole show.
Open Sauce and the maker scene
Open Sauce is a California conference in its fourth year, created after Maker Faire shut down to give builders a place to show off homemade machines, chemistry rigs, home rockets, and dangerous backyard experiments. Prime attended his third year running. The crowd is packed with big science YouTubers — Michael Reeves, William Osman, Backyard Scientist, Nile Red, Styropyro (Drake), Doug Doug, Code Bullet, Comment Etiquette — many with ~10M subscribers, each doing some extreme "don't try this at home" build. Casey Muratori and Beginbot attended a different event (Better Software Conference in Sweden), setting up the two-conference framing.
The crowd-controlled Melee bot event
Prime got a 45-minute main-stage slot. The setup: a real GameCube runs Super Smash Bros. Melee; bots written in Python control the characters. The bots start as empty shells standing still. Audience members scan QR codes, split into four sectors, and each sector prompts an LLM (limited to 140 characters, OG-Twitter style). All prompts in a sector are mushed together, summarized by an LLM (~45s), then turned into Python code (~1.5 min) — total roughly six seconds from run to fight once code is ready. They used Grok 4.5 Fast for speed.
Four YouTubers (Doug Doug, Eric/Comment Etiquette, Bash Buddy, Code Bullet) acted as "planted" volunteers with megaphones to wrangle each audience sector. Highlights: Doug Doug's Donkey Kong grabbed Jigglypuff and walked off the edge, killing both; Code Bullet's Fox won partly by accident when Captain Falcon's bot glitched on a cloud and walked off the ledge. Code Bullet's crowd, told to submit zero prompts, sent 65.
The technical backbone: libmelee
The bots don't do vision recognition — they read the game's internal state directly via *libmelee*, a mature library built by the Melee community (which produced ~8 hours of documentaries on itself and rebuilt frame-perfect, zero-lag netcode during COVID). This lets the LLM-written bots do frame-perfect inputs, wave dashing, L-cancelling — real advanced tech. Bots were deliberately blocked from internet/tool access so they couldn't just clone an existing best-bot repo; they got only basic game info, forcing the crowd's prompts to matter.
The on-stage disaster
Despite ~20 successful morning tests, TJ ("Teach") was still prompting last-minute style tweaks minutes before going live. On stage in front of 2,000 people, Cloudflare started returning errors — a brand-new bug never seen in testing. TJ pasted "cursor WTF" into the Cloudflare panel, hit enter, ran three agents on the same stack trace, and after ~3–5 minutes of Prime stalling the crowd, a "minus one" flashed and it suddenly worked. Nobody knows what fixed it. Prime called it one of the most stressful experiences of his life. Compounding problems: 2,000 phones on the same mobile network couldn't all load the QR-code site, and the QR codes weren't big enough for people in the back.
Takeaways and what's next
The recurring joke: TJ loves changing things at the 11th hour ("I got 10,000 lines more in me"), the antithesis of the "test 500 times, freeze days early" philosophy — and yet it worked out. Prime plans a rematch as Twitch-only, potentially mapping individual Twitch streams to characters for a four-streamer chat battle, and wants to force Casey (who has never played Melee) to prompt a bot. The broader observation on why you can't just say "make a good bot": without internet access the LLM's latent knowledge is hard to coax out, and copies of strategy code, while possibly in the training set, don't reliably surface — the human prompting is what makes it fun and functional.