Freya Holmér posted a short clip of a stress-relief side project and watched it explode across the internet. Then, before she'd even figured out the win condition, someone had already stolen the idea.
The concept is deceptively simple and immediately captivating: a Tetris-style falling block puzzle where landing a piece rotates the entire screen 90 degrees toward whichever side your blocks land on. Holmér, a developer and technical artist known in the gamedev community, posted the clip to X with a casual "Been feeling kinda stressed lately so I made a little prototype. Is this anything?"
The answer, as it turned out, was a very loud yes.
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2 million views and a five-hour countdown
The clip crossed 2 million views on X. Bluesky users said they needed to "spend hours playing this." Even Tim Schafer chimed in with a simple "Give me that." The response was exactly the kind of organic, genuine excitement that every indie developer dreams of when they share early work.
Then the timer started.
Nested in the replies on X, a self-described "efficient novelty maxing generalist" announced that "this can be built into a game by tomorrow." Four hours and 39 minutes after Holmér's original post, that same user was back with their own clip of a rotating Tetris clone, freshly generated through AI coding tools. In the video, the person casually explains their process: "someone showed a design of a rotating Tetris, and knowing how AI works and such, I was like, 'okay, it'll probably do something really interesting,' and it did. So."
No credit. No acknowledgment. Just vibes.
What Holmér actually said about it
"Someone already vibecoded (a bad clone of) this and shared it online because we live in the worst timeline," Holmér posted on Bluesky. "Y'know it kinda disincentivizes me from sharing progress when there are slop ghouls around every corner, AI or otherwise."
She elaborated further, putting the situation in terms that hit hard: "I'm a huge believer in putting intent and humanity into everything we create, and it's genuinely depressing how quickly people can steal work and release it on their own, with no recourse on my end. It's like posting a sketch of a drawing you made, and 20 people show up to finish the drawing for you and then boast about it online."
Here's the thing: the knockoff existing isn't the new part of this story. Shameless clones have followed every viral game concept for years. Wordle got ripped off within days of going viral. Among Us spawned a wave of imitators. Lethal Company ended up cloned on the iOS App Store before most people had even heard of the original. What's different now is the speed, and the total absence of effort required to do it.
The pressure to rush something she wasn't ready to rush
When Holmér shared her prototype, she hadn't even settled on what the win and fail states would look like. That's the whole point of sharing early work: to explore ideas in public, get feedback, and figure out what the concept actually wants to become. AI-assisted cloning collapses that space entirely.
"It slightly increases my motivation only because I want to prove them wrong," she said. "But it severely increases my stress and feeling pressured to get my version out as soon as possible."
Now she's scrambling to put a Steam page together just to stake her claim on her own idea. That's the new reality for indie developers who share work online: the moment something gets traction, the clock starts.
She did offer one sharp observation about the people copying her, though: "Luckily, these people are incapable of original thought and don't know how to elevate this concept beyond what they've already seen." Make sure to check out more:
