i tried making a game with ai and then this happened

i have a confession: I’ve been using ai a lot. Maybe this isn’t even a confession since i kind of talked about it already and also because i’ve literally already written a post with a header titled ‘confession pt 2’, but still.

it feels like i’ve been keeping a secret.

like you’ll judge me, like y’all will hate me (more than, of course, you already do, since that’s all an audience who tells you that they love your stuff actually does - hate you).

these are logic things! just like ai!

but ya know what? i’d rather be hated for who i am than ALEX NO

what the hell is happening? the ai discourse is discoursting. it’s odd and even and most of all it’s COMPLETED. people have made their calls and chosen their sides and now, we fight.

one might even say the whole thing is a heated rivalry. that’s what the show was about, right? a russian guy who loved ai but couldn’t admit it? hockey, too, but that was just a metaphor? i am not a tv critic but i know the truth when i hear about it from my friends who loved that show.

we digress!

and isn’t that the joy behar of it all? digression!? i started this post as a list of all the weird shit i’ve been building with ai, because baby, lemme tell ya, i’ve been building stuff.

not the optimize-yourself-out-of-a-job or make-millions-while-you-sleep kind of stuff, but dumb stuff. weird stuff. stuff that makes me feel like i did when I first started building on the internet in middle school.

is the stuff any good? no!

is it useful? a little!

i even started teaching other people how to do it with something called Code for Creatives, where I help non-coders make the weird stuff in their brains. It’s fun. We’ve done three cohorts now and there’s a fourth coming soon (oh softest of launches).

i’ve probably written like 30 essays about all of this, trying to explain how - ok no that’s a lie, i’ve half written four essays but still !

that’s a lot. that’s two full essays. 2!

i don’t know what to make of all this, but here’s a quick builder report of one thing i tried to make and the results therein1!!

i’ve just always been obsessed with the origins of phrases, like where do certain phrases come from? what are their origins?

why do we say “there’s more than one way to skin a cat?”

were there rival schools of thought on how to best skin a cat? did those people argue so much that other people, often, had to remind the group that there was no right way but, in fact, a lot of different ways could work?

or does the original phrase actually have more to do with the absurdity of the topic itself, like was the phrase meant to convey that there isn’t ANY right way to skin a cat, because obviously that’s inhumane, so this entire discussion is moot and void and we should all shut the fuck up about it and just do the thing we’re supposed to do, which is not skin a cat?

i’m gonna look up the answer now ALEX NO not yet, let me actually just keep explaining what i was trying to do, which is make a game.

i wanted to make a game where people could try to guess the origin of an idiom, and I wanted to use AI to help me make it.

here’s what I put into claude code, word for word:

I want to create a game based on idioms where I think you guess what an idiom means. I’m not sure exactly and I wanna run a grill me to figure it out. The things I like are the idea of something sort of uniform like Wordle but also this game where you guess a word and based on whatever you guess it tells you how close or far you are conceptually from the right word. Help me figure this out.

Claude gave me some options and then we did the grill me.

did y’all notice me just saying ‘we did the grill me’ like its a normal thing to say?? it isn’t! none of this is!

basically grill me is just a really simple skill I use all the time inside claude code that helps clarify what it is i’m trying to do before the ai goes and does it.

here’s an abridged play by play of what happened next (if you prefer to read the whole convo i’ve got it as text here)

that was fast!! i literally answered one question and then got bored haha.

and i haven’t really touched it since writing about it here.

why? because it hasn’t popped back up into my mind, which I treat as the main signal of whether i need to keep working on an idea: does it keep bubbling up? is it nagging? is it demanding my attention? in this case, it did not.

but here’s the real question: was this effort a success?

and maybe even more so: was this the right way to do it?

and perhaps even more importantly: would I do anything differently next time?

obviously the fact that it didn’t turn into anything real does not, itself, mean that it was a failure. most stuff fails. the trying is the move, and i’m glad i tried.

i said yes to my own idea enough so that i invested time and energy into exploring it. the first ten or so years of my illustrative career as an artist were spent battling my inability to say yes to anything.

this, they say, in progress studies, is progress.

but did I actually explore, or did I offload the hard exploration work to the ai such that it let me off the hook?

and because I didn’t get a quick win, did the idea fizzle prematurely (am i right ladies?), whereas the idea might very well have thrived and prospered if i’d given it some more analog time and love before tossing it into the SPEED EM UP AND GET ER DONE machine??

might i have kept working on it, exploring the idea without the sped-up help of Claude?

maybe that would have helped me protect the love I had of the idea?

or perhaps all of that is bullshit? perhaps it was the speedy prototyping that helped me realize, quickly and without waste, there wasn’t much there?

here’s what i know: tossing the idea into cluade code means putting it up to the test and seeing how strong it is when battle tested. but once i made that decision, it became less interesting to tend or even find that initial fire, that spark, that special something, because by then, i’d shot my shot.

however and much to the contrary, here we are.

i’m writing about the idea and lemme tell ya: writing about skinning the cat got me excited! not bc of the skinning or the cat but because of the idea.

i got that tickle of fun and play that i do believe are my north star (N).

these weren’t really about building a game but about the weird truths that might be at the other end of something we now take for granted inside of our language.

which maybe was the whole thing I was interested in from the start? who knows? who cares?

counter factuals aren’t worth the fax they’re sent on, not here, in the lands of creativity and crass. lets have a laugh, a think, a peek, a gas. who knows, who cares, except of course, me and also you.

i’m gonna look up what skinning a cat actually means...

okay yea, it’s pretty rough.

most etymology nerds find the earliest origin of the phrase in “The Money Diggers,” an 1840 essay in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine (edited by one Edgar A. Poe???):

“There are more ways than one to skin a cat, so are there more ways than one of digging for money.”

others think it has to do with preparing catfish in the south, while others say it’s about a move kids did on the playground.

most people though agree that it did have to do with actually skinning a cat for its fur, which at the time was used for lady garments.

so there you have it folks!

the answer to not just one riddle, but two!

beyond the somewhat haunting truths of a time that really was not that long ago when you think about it for even half a second (separate essay, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how we treat the time of the dinasours and the time of the nazis both as ancient history), my realization is this:

what i like is the riddle itself! playing with it, and exploring it, and havin a gas with it. The result is fun too, sure, but not nearly as much so as all that comes before

sure fine yes, the journey not the destination way to go plato you really got it now, but what does that mean for...anything? No idea!

well, one: maybe i’ll have a recurring newsletter that’s just me exploring the origins of phrases? i was thinking it’d be fun to just post a phrase and have people guess, and then i’d reveal it the next time. obviously people could look it up but I bet they wouldn’t.

maybe i’ll try that. maybe i won’t.

maybe the next time i have an idea like this, i’ll stay analog with it for a bit longer, or write about it, before tossing it into the claudechine and seeing what comes out the other side. there is, after all, more than one way to skin a ALEX NO.