Out of the Notebook

If you look at my itch pages this month you’ll see a setting flipped that wasn’t flipped before. The generative AI disclosure now says yes, on everything, including pages where it used to say no. I picked the comfortable answer on a binary form for a while and I’d rather correct that myself than have someone correct it for me. This is the longer answer either way.

I’ve had game ideas since I was a kid. Hundreds of them, the kind you keep in notebooks and folders and describe to maybe one friend. I spent about twenty years trying to learn to code well enough to build any of it. It never took. I’d get through the tutorials, hit the wall where the real program lives, and stall until the next attempt a year later.

Then I had a cancer scare, and the math changed. I’m fine. But sitting with it did what twenty years of tutorials couldn’t: it made the backlog feel mortal. These ideas either become things or they die with me, and nobody else is going to build them.

So I use Claude as my engineer, and I want to be precise about what that means, because the details are where the honesty lives. I design the games. Premises, mechanics, writing, difficulty, what stays, what gets cut: mine. The code that makes them run: mostly Claude’s, written under my direction and beaten on until it does what the design says. I’ve written elsewhere that a model with no source of truth averages its training data and hands you a composite sketch, and that fed your design document and your constraints, it hands you labor instead. Labor was the thing I never had. Taste was never the shortage.

Close to twenty games went into development in the last two weeks. They’re decent. Some are original, some wear their influences openly, and every one of them got tuned by hand. Two weeks was never possible before because implementation was the wall. The wall is gone, and what’s left is the part I could always do and could never reach.

Not everyone will meet this halfway, and that costs real things. I asked a musician I respect to score one of my games, an NES project I care about. He declined because I use LLMs to build. I understand completely. He drew a line where his conscience puts it, and the line is legible to me. If you see the disclosure toggle and close the tab, I don’t begrudge you either. Writing this work off wholesale is a coherent response to an industry that has earned plenty of contempt.

And it has earned it. Most of what gets called AI right now arrives wrapped in the worst incentives capitalism can attach to a technology: extraction, layoffs dressed as innovation, slop at scale. I won’t defend any of that, and I won’t pretend my tools came from somewhere clean. A bad year taught me there is no clean somewhere. There is only what you do with the leverage you can reach, and I decided to spend mine building the games I was otherwise going to die holding.

I got more back than games. I recorded music this year for the first time in years, because a project needed a soundtrack and it turned out the person I most wanted to hear attempt it was me. In July I wrote in my own notes that these tools took the exhausting work out of creation that I was too exhausted to do myself, and that I was shipping things only I could have dreamed of. That’s still the whole of it.

If you stay, here’s the deal on every page where that toggle says yes: real ideas from a real person who cared about making them decent. Built with a machine. Tuned by a human. Finally out of the notebook.