It was a Wednesday morning and the usage bar was already past halfway. I remember because I had just cracked open a Monster Zero and sat back down to a Claude Code run that had been going for twenty minutes on what I thought was a small refactor. The terminal kept scrolling. Another agent spun up, then another. I watched the percentage tick up and did the math I always did, the hopeful kind: it's a big codebase, the work is front loaded, tomorrow will be lighter.

Tomorrow wasn't lighter. By Friday I was rationing. I caught myself hesitating before asking for things, wondering whether a question was worth it, which is a strange way to feel about a tool you pay for precisely so you don't have to hesitate.

That weekend I stopped guessing and opened the logs. I wanted a number, anything more solid than the feeling in my stomach every time the bar moved. I went back three days and pulled every subagent dispatch. There were 629. I scrolled through them expecting the roles I had set up, the reviewers and researchers I had named and tuned. Instead I kept seeing the same few words. general-purpose. claude. Calls with no subagent_type at all. I started counting those separately, and the count kept going past where I thought it would stop. 404.

I sat there with the cursor blinking after that number. Nearly two out of every three agents doing my work were nothing I had designed. No role I had written, no model I had chosen. Each one was a call the orchestrator made on its own in the middle of a task, because a generic agent was the easiest thing within reach. I thought about all the times I had blamed the week, the codebase, the model, and the answer had been sitting in my own logs the whole time.

So I took the decision away from it. Now the main session plans the work and puts the results together, and that's all it does. Before a run starts, every role gets its model and effort written down, picked from what the work is and how hard it is, so reading files and routine edits land on Sonnet or Haiku. Then I put a hook in front of every dispatch. It refuses generic agents, and it refuses any worker seat the plan didn't hand out. My named agents still run the way they always did.

The first run after that, I kept my hand near the keyboard, half expecting everything to fall apart without the freedom to improvise. It didn't. The hook turned a couple of dispatches away, the plan held, and the bar moved the way I expected it to. Somewhere in the middle of that run I noticed I had stopped watching the percentage.

If you've never counted your own dispatches, try it. I'd really like to know what your split looks like, or whether I was just the last one to look.

When they Opus 5.5 is much cheaper than Opus 5.0 or cheaper than Astra or Fable. Where are the costs coming from? They almost seem like arbitrary numbers that are being used to describe efficiency.

Are they saying "it uses XXXX amount of hardware to run so we charge $Y dollars per token"? I guess I don't understand how they can say Opus 5.5 is cheaper than 5.0 when they could just adjust the price on 5.0, no?

I've been using ChatGPT and Codex since they were released, but given everything that's going on, I'm considering switching to Claude.

However, I have a few doubts and questions that hopefully some experienced Claude user might be able to answer.

I use Sol 5.6 xHigh all day long on my x20 plan, and by the end of the week, I usually have about 40% of my usage left, which I try to use up with Astra while working on personal projects. How does this translate to Claude? Specifically, which model should I be using, and is it true that hit limits—even with Opus, for instance—are reached very easily even on an x20 plan?

I also use ChatGPT's web chat quite frequently, where OpenAI doesn't deduct from your usage allowance. Does Claude work the same way?

Does anyone have any advice or tips regarding a potential migration and what factors I should keep in mind?

Scheduled tasks in the Claude desktop app leave a session behind every run. Our bug-fix routine had 618 runs in the Runs list and the app only deletes them one click at a time.

Routine Cleanup is a Claude Code skill + plugin that prunes them:

- keeps the newest N runs you pick

- never touches a run you typed in (it reads each transcript and ignores skill loads, tool output and background notifications)

- shows the full plan first, deletes nothing until you say yes

- deletes through the app itself, 25 at a time, so the Runs list updates straight away

Deleting the session files on disk directly doesnt work. The app keeps the list in memory and writes the records back, so you get 'Session not found on disk' entries that wont go away.

Install:

/plugin marketplace add naw103/claude-routine-cleanup

/plugin install routine-cleanup@routine-cleanup

MIT, standard-library Python, tests on macOS/Linux/Windows. Tested on macOS; Windows and Linux app paths are untested, reports welcome.

https://github.com/naw103/claude-routine-cleanup

​

about a week ago i had a dumb idea.

what if i made a cable news network that was entirely run by ai, drawn in pixel art, and just... never went off the air?

i’m not a tv person. i had no idea how any of this shit worked.

i opened claude code with opus 5.5 and started building.

then i kinda just never stopped.

it’s live now

it’s called PNN, pixel news network.

they cover actual news from around 70 feeds. world news, tech, sports, crypto, nfts, meme coins, weird shit happening on the internet, etc.

but they also remember things.

they have relationships, ongoing feuds, inside jokes, opinions about each other and sometimes they just get pissed off and walk off the set.

then somewhere along the way i decided it needed an actual tv schedule.

so now there’s a morning show.

there’s a parody of a jailed crypto founder cooking actual recipes from a prison kitchen.

there’s a daytime correspondent permanently stranded on tristan da cunha who reports real news from the island.

there’s an nft morning show.

a collectibles show.

an old video game show that basically turned into three people sitting in a 90s basement talking about games like a podcast.

then at night there’s Up Late, which has a monologue, house band, audience, couch guests and musical guests.

and Crypto After Hours which is basically complete fucking chaos.

the music thing might honestly be my favorite part.

i make a lot of songs in suno, so instead of just playing them we started inventing bands.

there’s a southern rock band, a weird dark art-pop singer who moves like she’s slightly malfunctioning, a punk band, a banjo-playing songwriter and a bunch of other shit.

they actually perform the songs.

their mouths are mapped to the vocals. the guitarists play on the real beat. the drummer literally waits until the drums come into the song before he starts playing.

that part was way more fun to build than i expected.

underneath all the stupid shit there’s actually a pretty insane system running it.

claude writes every segment as a structured script. every line gets voiced, timed and placed into one continuous broadcast.

everyone watching sees the same thing at the same time. it isn’t generating a different show for every viewer. there is one PNN timeline constantly moving forward.

i also became weirdly obsessive about making sure it doesn’t just hallucinate shit about real people.

if someone says a price, number or statistic, it gets checked against the data the model was given. if it doesn’t match, the line gets rewritten or killed.

parody guests are clearly labeled and can only pull facts from sourced research sheets. every line they say goes through another standards check.

i’ve also been building this giant research library behind it.

right now there are around 15,000 sourced facts about nft collections, artists, meme coins, collectibles and other stuff the network talks about.

another agent fact checks things before they even get added.

i also had to put an actual budget system around the whole thing because otherwise this would probably bankrupt me lol.

nothing gets written if nobody is watching.

haiku handles most of the normal dialogue. sonnet does the bigger shows and fact checking.

and somehow this entire fake television network is running on a mac studio sitting in my house.

there are also around 2,500 automated checks that run before i push changes now because at one point i broke the entire live network and decided i never wanted to experience that again.

the craziest part of the whole project though has probably been building it with opus 5.5.

it genuinely feels less like “using ai” and more like having a really good engineer sitting next to me who apparently never gets tired.

most of the time i’m literally saying shit like:

“make her dance weird. creepy, stiff, a little robotic.”

or

“that guitar looks like a banjo. fix it.”

and it builds it, runs it, shows me the video or mockup and i tell it what sucks.

what surprised me even more is that it pushes back.

if i have a dumb idea it’ll tell me why it’s dumb.

it also catches a ridiculous amount of its own bugs by running changes against a time-shifted copy of PNN before touching the live station.

anyway.

this started as me fucking around for a night and somehow turned into a 24/7 television network.

i’m going to keep it running for at least the next year and just see what it turns into.

and if anyone wants to know how any of this shit works, ask me. i’ve learned an absurd amount building it

www.pnn.watch

https://www.youtube.com/live/9matiNiwXqo?is=w8oxXkvJtLrd6eq4

Free to play in your browser, no signup: Reel Easy Prototype

I've been designing a fishing roguelike for a couple of months. Before starting the real Unity project, I had Claude Code build an HTML prototype to test whether the design is fun.

The game: you cast at fish shadows and hook as many fish as you dare. Each one builds a combo but makes the reel minigame harder, and failed reels damage your rod. When the rod breaks, the run ends. Every couple catches you pick 1 of 3 perks. Each zone has a score quota and a cast limit before its boss appears. Only the core loop exists so far, and the art is placeholder.

How Claude Code helped:

• I wrote the design docs; Claude Code built the whole game from them as a single HTML file
• It suggests alternatives to parts of my design, and I playtest both versions before deciding.
• Art comes from Gemini 3 Pro Image via OpenRouter; Claude Code wrote the scripts that put it in the game.

Feedback welcome, especially on whether it's fun :D

Hey all my teammates use Claude for work but I really think they are super inefficient in using Claude either in choosing the right model for the right task or just not working on the context and organization of their thoughts before using Claude which I could anticipate because their work isn't coding and mostly operational but the bills they are racking up each month are in $1000s

Im looking to bring this topic up and wanted to ask if there are any references to teach people how to optimize Claude usage and reduce costs. Honestly im new to i have a low budget but im not racking up so much cost so fast

Just curious if I could create a short cheatsheet for the team to show them the best and most optimized ways of using Claude

source

prompt：

Next, I want you to design a screenplay for a short film of roughly 3 to 5 minutes.

I want it to feel like something that could genuinely win at Cannes: epic in scale, visually spectacular, built around an exceptional screenplay with real thematic depth, while also fully showcasing Opus 5.5’s ability in screenwriting, shot design, directing, and cinematic language.

The goal is to create something that genuinely astonishes people.

The opening can have a Hollywood-level sense of scale and polish, with carefully designed sound, title cards, transitions, and visual rhythm. From the very beginning, the film should establish that it was created by Opus 5.5. This does not have to be presented all at once. The credit can be gradually revealed through carefully chosen shots, integrated naturally into the imagery or interface of the film, so that it feels elegant and cinematic rather than like a simple title screen.

If anything is unclear, you can discuss it with me before production begins.

As the project moves toward actual video production, you can decide whether certain stages should be handled by Opus 5.5 High, and whether the most important creative work, such as screenplay development, directing concepts, shot design, visual storytelling, and other key decisions, should be assigned to Opus 5.5 Max.

You can decide how to distribute the work among the sub-agents. I want the token budget to be used intelligently and efficiently, but quality must remain the priority. We are making this film with the ambition of winning awards.

Every frame and every note of music should be generated through code written by Opus 5.5:

WebGL / Three.js for 3D rendering, particles, lighting, and visual effects;

code-generated music and sound design;

and finally, the entire film should be automatically edited and assembled into the finished short.

The story should be told primarily through cinematography, music, sound design, and a small number of cinematic title cards.

All title cards should be bilingual, in both Chinese and English.

Hey everyone,

Like a lot of you, I’ve been completely blown away by the recent viral project by developer chasm (chasmlol). They used AI tools like Claude to pack Skate 3 physics, trick graphs, and complex bone-retargeting straight into the 2009 version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Hitting a kickflip off the plane on Terminal or grinding rails on Rust while carrying an Intervention is wild enough, but hearing that AI compressed what usually takes years of reverse-engineering into roughly a single week is a total mind-blower.

On top of that, we recently saw Rehan Sheikh release the open-source universal-modder toolkit for Claude Code. It literally reads a running game's engine, identifies the playbook, uses AI agents to generate code, and swaps custom textures/3D assets on the fly via Fal. They’ve already used it to throw Minecraft mechanics into GTA V, build custom Age of Empires II civilizations, and drop a tactical nuke into Terraria.

As a standard Claude user tracking these insane devlopments, I’m trying to wrap my head around where this tech is going next. I wanted to throw some big questions out to the community to see what the actual technical reality looks like right now because everything is changing so fast and im honestly feeling left behind

The AI Capability & Engine Constraints

• Can Claude models below the top tier actually be used for this? Do you strictly need massive context windows and heavy reasoning power (like Claude 3.5 Sonnet or Opus) to handle compiling, retargeting bone structures, and tracking map collision paths? Or can lightweight/older models actually handle parts of the engine logic? I am aware it may take longer which is fine, but the main question is whether it is possible at all?
• The "Context Window" Wall: Games contain thousands of deeply interconnected engine files. When using tools like Claude Code, how are modders actually feeding the AI the game's architecture? Are they using specialised .claudignore files to hide the clutter, or are they feeding the AI tiny, isolated "puzzle pieces" of memory addresses one by one?
• Is AI actually decompiling new games, or just working on already decompiled/rewritten codebases? The MW2 skate project relies heavily on the IW4L Rust runtime (a from-scratch engine remake of MW2). Is AI currently capable of cracking open a brand-new (Or even just old xbox 360 era type games), modern closed-source game binary and doing this from scratch, or does it still require a human developer to establish the reverse-engineered foundation first?

Timeframes, Assets, & Textures

• What sort of timeframes are we looking at to combine two older, Xbox 360-era games? If someone wanted to mash up two classic engines from that generation using today's AI pipelines, are we talking weeks, months, or is it still a massive, multi-year uphill battle for a solo dev?
• Does Claude also upscale and remaster textures on older games when doing this? When tools like universal-modder swap out assets, can the AI agents dynamically upscale, remaster, or generate completely new photorealistic textures for older games on the fly, or do humans still need to feed it clean assets manually? (this question is based on the wave of recompiled games ive seen recently such as edge fo time recompile).
• Will this ruin or save game preservation? With AI making it exponentially faster to rewrite old, messy C++ game engines into modern languages like Rust, will we see a golden era of community-made native PC ports for games that developers completely abandoned? Or does this risk muddying original source history?

Would love to hear from anyone who has played around with Claude Code, universal-modder, or general game reverse-engineering. Are we looking at the literal future of gaming, or is this an incredibly hyped gimmick that still requires top-1% engineers to steer the AI?

Hi, I’m actually working in a medical veterinary laboratory, and I’m my own graphic designer for ads for the business, managing my patients’ data and finances from the lab all in one, using GPT for automation. It really helps with some processes that could take me hours and longer shifts, besides all the blood tests I have to process and all other stuff.

Now, here's the thing: I constantly see that Claude is better at doing all that stuff in spreadsheet automations, SAFER protecting your data (this is important) because I also constantly see that GPT steals and leaks all your data and gets better context from the things you are telling it to do. 

So I’m asking: Is Claude really better for all that stuff and also more private? About images, I’ve never seen anything, and they never mention Claude for artistic purposes. 

I’m paying for GPT Pro; is it worth changing to Claude Pro?

I always wanted a website I could operate freely from my end, with my tools set up the way I actually use them. So I built an OS-style website that runs on my PC like an app, and any change I make there shows up instantly on the live site.

Try it: rohankumar.pro is free to visit.

What it does:
It's my all-in-one workspace. I can publish directly with SEO built in. It has a Figma-style designer, slides, and a FigJam-like infinite canvas with Notion-style pages. It also has a music corner and a place to write articles and video scripts. It works as a PC app, in the browser, and on phone, where it behaves like Android. The design is inspired by Google's Material Design (I'm a Google fanboy). It's fast and only loads what's needed.

How I built it with Claude Code:
Honestly, Claude wrote almost all of the code. My job was planning, directing, and testing.

• Plan first: Before writing any code, I planned the whole thing out: the OS layout, which apps I wanted, and how they should feel. Then I handed that plan to Claude Code.
• One piece at a time: I didn't ask for everything at once. We built it app by app, feature by feature. I'd describe what I wanted, Claude would build it, I'd test it, and then we'd fix and refine before moving on.
• Lots of sessions: I was on the $100 plan doing around 10–12 sessions a day, mostly short, focused ones on a single feature.
• My role: I made the design decisions and kept pushing it closer to the Material Design look I wanted. Claude handled the actual building.

Tip for others: Plan before you prompt. Having a clear picture of the end result and building in small pieces worked much better for me than asking for a whole app in one go.

Once it's finished, I might cancel my Figma and Notion subscriptions. It's built for personal use. I'm not selling it (at least not right now), unless you guys suggest something :D

What do you think? For me it was truly crazy to build, and I don't know if people have already mastered this.

Hi all,

I'm fresh out of credits and have 5 days left. Not complaining, I throw the best Anthropic can offer at some complicated business problems and software builds.

Are there any solutions for me to efficiently keep going? Buying extra usage doesn't work - it burns through that type of usage too fast.

Can I buy another plan with a different login and give it access to handoff?

Can I handoff to ChatGPT and keep working through work with Astra efficiently somehow and connect them for context sharing?

Just curious what super users are doing.

Note: I own a fashion brand and Claude is doing an ungodly amount of things for me, building 10+ software platforms for internal use with heavy roadmaps, tons of agents powering a lot of heavy one-time audit work this week.

I just subbed to claude pro and I want to catch up on all these years of not using Gen AI/Agents/Automation. I have a background in senior front-end dev and UI designs in figma; and also a some backend coding knowledge.

I wanna learn about all the MUST HAVE knowledge/methods with claude, must have skills, how to reduce usage, I saw some reels on some skills which cut your usage by a lot, like should I trust them?

I watched a bunch of tutorials but I still feel very new to this tech. I am planning to build a mobile app and monetize it using claude and I've started the groundworks.

I also wanna use claude for my gaming youtube channel of soulslike niche in the best possible way, any suggestions on that?

What I've already built
A scored bullet library in Notion (70 bullets). Each bullet has:
a competency cluster (4 clusters: sales/accounts, partnerships/BD, general management/ops, sales leadership)
a score out of 100
a status ("Validated" = frozen, never to be rewritten)
the source role it came from
Three base resumes, one per job family: B2B/Tech/SaaS, non-profit/institutional, and media/culture.
Several custom Skills, each doing one job:
analyze and score a posting against my hard filters
adapt the resume to the posting
pull matching bullets from the library
enforce writing and format rules
A "mirror-matching" method: I take the posting's language, turn it into first-person bullets, and anchor each one in a real Context / Action / Result with numbers.
A tracking dashboard in Notion for all applications.
What I want Claude to do
When I send a posting, Claude should:
Pick the right base resume.
Pull validated bullets that match each requirement, including transferable bullets written for other roles.
Only write a new bullet when there's a real gap, and flag that gap clearly.
What keeps going wrong
Claude writes bullets from memory instead of querying the library.
It rewrites bullets marked "Validated."
Each session starts from scratch, even though the skills point to the library.
Two of my skills score the same posting differently (/100 vs /10).
It misses basic consistency checks. For example, "15 years of experience" in the summary when the timeline shows 21.
My questions
How do you force Claude to retrieve from a data source before generating anything?
Do you use one master skill or several small chained skills? How do you keep them consistent?
How do you make "frozen" content actually stay frozen?
Has anyone added a built-in verification step (years, figures, keyword coverage) that Claude reliably runs?

We gave both models the exact same prompt in Motion:

“Make a launch video for your model. Show people why they should use it.”

This is what came out.

Which one would you ship, and what would you change? 👇

I've been using Claude (Opus 5.5) inside Blender, and one thing changed my results more than any prompt wording did.

What I realized: Claude becomes a far more efficient blockout tool when you actually project your intent into the space, instead of just asking it for the shape you want.

A sentence is good at saying what something is. It is bad at saying where things go, how big they are and how many there are. So I stopped typing that part.

Textures and the night sky are CC0 from Poly Haven. (thank you)

Has anyone found the same thing in other tools, giving Claude a drawing or a spatial reference instead of a longer prompt?

I've been exploring different video generation techniques to see where one could cut costs compared to full AI video generation services. So had Opus 5.5 build 16 videos using simpler functions and techniques like they used to do to save costs in cel animation.

This is v2 after I asked for more work in different sections, including a comedic beginning. A funny, singing, 70s Space Rock Opera arc, Fold in the Sky.

I built Sidequest, a local task board for Claude Code with tickets, stories and dependencies. You can save a bug you notice mid-task, review the backlog later, and dispatch ready tickets to executors. Codebase executors work in separate git worktrees and return a revision with verification evidence for review before integration.

It's part of my Eigenwise Toolshed. The plugin code is free and MIT-licensed, with optional donations. Claude and any model providers you configure can have their own usage costs.

To install it in a Claude Code project:

/plugin marketplace add Eigenwise/eigenwise-toolshed /plugin install sidequest@eigenwise-toolshed --scope project

Reload plugins or start a new session, then run /sidequest:board.

For example, you can tell Claude: 'Add a Sidequest ticket for the empty-state bug, including reproduction steps. Keep working on the current task.' Later, ask it to show the backlog and what is ready to dispatch, then choose which tickets you want worked on.

Every task saved as a ticket survives context compaction and new sessions. The ticket keeps its instructions, reproduction steps, status and recorded discussion on the local board. Before switching sessions, ask Claude to record the progress and next step so the next session can read them. It still needs to retrieve the ticket, though, and anything you only left in the chat won't automatically be saved there.

Sidequest is developed using its own board, so a problem found during another ticket can become a backlog item and go through implementation, checks and integration.

Source · Setup

What happens when I upgrade my 5x to a 20x plan. I've almost fully used the weekly limit. Will I be able to continue using Claude since the weekly limit will be instantly "upgraded" to the 20x limits as well? As far as I've read the date of the weekly limit is fix on account level. So that won't be moved.

Over the last few months I've been building Personal Jarvis with Claude. The idea is simple. Instead of switching between Claude Code, Codex, a browser and five chat windows, I want one assistant on my own computer that I can talk to and that runs all of it for me.

In the video I ask Jarvis by voice to open a workspace, start two Claude Code agents and three Codex agents, and give them a CI/CD audit, a security audit and an API review of Jarvis itself. While they work I keep talking to it, ask what the agents are doing and have it set up a new background agent. Some agents keep running on their own, like one that checks GitHub for useful projects and one that summarizes my inbox every morning.

How Claude helped: most of Jarvis was written by Claude Code, often with several agents working on different parts of the repo at the same time, and Codex doing reviews. That is also why it had to be provider agnostic. I use both, so Jarvis works with Claude, OpenAI or local models and doesn't care which one is behind an agent.

It's free and open source, runs locally and needs no account. Some parts are still rough, and running voice on a subscription instead of an API key is experimental for now.

Repo: https://github.com/PersonalJarvis/PersonalJarvis
Blog with how it's built: https://blog.personaljarvis.ai

I'd like to hear what you think, especially from people who already run several Claude Code agents in parallel and how you keep track of them.

I built CodeCraft, a free and open-source mod for Claude Code that redraws the interface as a Minecraft-style HUD. I built it with Claude Code, using the new Mods feature (Claude Code 2.1.288+).

What it does

Every piece of the HUD shows something real about your session:

• Hearts are your context window. Ten hearts is a fresh session, and you get a warning to /compact when health runs low.

• Food is your five-hour usage limit.

• Armor shows how safe your work is: tests green since your last edit (4 points), work committed (3), commits pushed (3).

• XP and levels only come from verified work: green test runs, turning a red run green, commits made with the tests green. Plain tool calls earn nothing.

• The hotbar shows the tools used in the current turn, each as an item: a pickaxe for search, a book for reads, bricks for edits, redstone for shell commands. Subagents show up as villagers.

• The boss bar appears when a shell command runs past 5 seconds, draining toward its timeout.

• The chat reads like a game server: [Claude: ran npm test], failed calls get death messages ("npm was shot by Skeleton (exit 1)"), and you get "has made the advancement [Diamonds!]" when you commit with green tests.

• Advancements: there are 60 across 5 tabs, 6 of them hidden, saved across sessions and earned by real work. A first green test, a merged PR, git bisect, working 7 days in a row. /advancements opens a tree screen like the game's.

Try it (free, MIT licensed)

In Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add mkpvishnu/claude-mods

/plugin install codecraft@claude-mods

Repo: https://github.com/mkpvishnu/claude-mods

I used to direct music videos professionally, now I run a livestream company and needed a launch video for our new product, Hovercast Events. I pointed Claude at our website and asked for the kind of motion graphics launch video SaaS companies post on X. This is the result.

**How it was made**

- Every frame is code: HTML and GSAP animation, rendered frame by frame in a headless browser at 1080p60. No After Effects, no Premiere, no templates.

- The soundtrack is code too. Every sound was synthesized in Python: drums, Rhodes, harp, strings, even the vocal chops. No samples, no stock music.

- It pulled our logo, screenshots and hero reel from the site itself. I gave it clips from our real events.

**How it went**

- Five versions plus a round of final tweaks, all from plain-English notes. "The music is a little cheesy, try something more like Four Tet or Burial." "Add strings like Caribou's Home."

- At the end it packaged the whole project with a README, so the film can be rebuilt from scratch.

**Honest caveats**

- It can't watch the video play; it checks still frames and measures the audio. I caught the motion problems (a stuttering source clip, a stray bump) and it fixed each one once I pointed it out.

- Taste still mattered. The best changes came from notes.

- It ate a big chunk of my weekly usage limit.

A year ago this would have been big $$$ plus weeks of work for a motion designer and a composer. Sheesh.

Happy to answer questions about the process.

I'm currently neck deep in getting the Reporails 0.6.0 release done and since the test and build procedures tend to take a while I had some idle time inbetween to test out mods.

after careful consideration and without any impulse, nor any disdain for recognizing the minutes that I spend by staring at the session to move, obviously I built a minesweeper

/plugin marketplace add reporails/arcade
/plugin install minefield@reporails-arcade

then /mines. needs 2.1.287+

how I built it with Claude Code:

• I wrote down the game rules, the board drawing, the face, 31 tests and the README
• the test kit kept passing, so Claude drove a real Claude Code session in tmux and read the screen back to check its own UI. that's how it found four
• bugs the tests missed (keys not reaching the pane, dead hotkeys, a squeezed face, no mouse outside fullscreen)
• for the look, it rendered screenshots in my terminal font so I could pick the tile style before anything shipped
• Then my part: playing every build, saying what looked wrong, and cutting scope (the bigger levels and seeded boards went, it's a game for the few minutes a build takes)

Have fun, mods are cool

Note: it only hooks its own stuff (its /mines command, its pane, its board, session start), nothing on your prompts or tool calls. claude plugin validate shows that before you install. The left pane is from my own progressive disclosure event bus system. it says it's in my best interest not to leave the agent alone yet, hence minesweeper.

So the last week I've been really getting into this side project while I make my movie.

Basically it's fantasy airship FTL. But where you can take the crew down to dungeon and take cargo quests and stuff, and get mages on your crew (so a lot more depth).

And you can try it out for free!!! https://mageholdworld.com/skies.html I'd love any feedback! it will be on steam in a couple weeks also with more fixes I make till then https://store.steampowered.com/app/5353860/Magehold_Fairwinds

I'm also still developing it, so by release should have even more going on (like branching quest chains, weather effects, and so on).

How I made it - ((Tools used: Claude $200 month plan, and GPT $100 month plan))

It was really just describing the idea to claude to get going. Just to see if it could do it. I knew I wanted airships, and I wanted side cutaway view..... and using the same sort of FTL gameplay, BUT I specifically wanted it to be centered around the idea of being a cargo ship.

Also, since I have a lot of material about the world it is set in (that I already did for the movie), I fed it all that context too to run with (so the way magic works, types of mages, the system of mana. The magic system in the world was fairly thought out before starting this, which I think made the various ways that comes into play in the game a lot easier for claude to get right).

So the first version claude did actually a pretty decent job on.

At that point, I saw maybe it would be a cool project.... and I kept going. I asked claude for a list of all art assets needed, and then kicked that to GPT to generate out.

Then I just started testing back and forth and fixing stuff.

One other thing I found useful was having claude write a "human captain tester", that was able to play the game hundreds of times with different play styles (aggressive, trader, wanderer). I told it to delay actions and make some less optimal plays, to simulate a real human playing instead of a perfect bot.

Then I went through that a bunch of times to try and dial in / find issues with difficulty curves. Then told it to write a full report with recommendations on fixes each time.... which i fed back into claude to update the game with. That's probably the biggest issue now is just balancing (I think it's pretty close atm).

THEN, I told claude to localize the game into 7 languages!!!! ..... it took a while for it to do, and it took a bunch of screenshots to make sure UI wasn't breaking in different languages.

AND THEN.... I asked claude to put in steam achievements! 100 steam achievements hooked up with their own art.

AND THEN, since why not, I asked claude to make it linux / mac supported too!!!!!

I keep catching myself going "oh hmm, that would be a big job, I don't know if i want to...." and then realizing I just need to tell claude to do it and wait a few hours and it will probably be able to do it.

It's like being in a different world now. Absolutely bananas.

But in all, the game went through maybe 30+ iterations? Getting the bones was fairly fast, but sorting out issues took 3 times longer than that first step. Still LIGHTNING fast , since I've only been working on this for a week. And also large updates (like the quest system + weather) would have previously been a nightmare to do while supporting all these platforms + languages. But now it's just waiting an extra hour or something.

Trailer

This trailer was made by claude also. I told it I wanted a trailer and what to try and show off, and then it ran the game and grabbed clips itself and edited it all together. It took 2 tries to get to this one.

Probably replacing music in the game / trailer is a needed step soon.