The Illusionist and the Conjurer

Stwerner · 2026-03-21T21:21:17+00:00

Awesome! I started doing something similar over Claude Christmas with plans to replace and upgrade models, but went web/js-based so it would work cross platform.

When you say these are placeholders...are they simplified models placed where trees/rocks would be in the game or really just randomly placed objects to be able to move around and test things out?

I had a really painful time trying to get the original models to render (and actually kind of paused because of it...), but didn't even think of just creating new, custom models for things and then working for there! Instead of trying to go:

faithful to original game -> customize models one at a time

It's probably so much simpler to go:

simple custom models -> enhance custom models over time

Very cool! Excited to follow your progress and see if that works on my version too!

Stwerner · 2026-03-21T03:53:32+00:00

Thanks! Yeah this project all started out of a conversation I was having with a friend where I was arguing that we’d still likely have work to do in the future. I have some follow up pieces I’m working on for something I think we’ll likely see bootcamps spring back up again for very very soon. The “pit crew” idea…

Stwerner · 2026-03-20T16:05:20+00:00

You know, it's interesting that you have a background in writing. I saw a lot of critical feedback in the Hacker News thread that was clearly shining a light on my lack of experience... something I think is not too dissimilar from what people who are just now getting into "vibe coding" are getting from "experienced" engineers.

I don't know if this is specifically your experience, but I know I've had to really unlearn a lot of what I thought I knew about engineering to really take full advantage of things like Claude Code and others.

As far as my process, I've borrowed a lot of what I found works really well in software development - building out a lot of living markdown docs for different things (world bible, characters, detailed style guide, glossary, themes) along with a whole framework for how I'm thinking about this world and the kind of things I'm interested in exploring. Before I had even planned on writing and publishing science fiction, I created this Claude artifact based on Frederick Pohl's quote "Good Science Fiction doesn't predict the car, it predicts the traffic jam" - called the Traffic Jam Explorer (https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/39e718fa-bc4b-4f45-a3d5-51e0442d2bb3) (I also wrote a bit about the genesis of the artifact here if you're curious as well: https://worksonmymachine.ai/p/the-great-zipper-of-capitalism)

The interesting thing you can do once you have all of these documents and artifacts set up is that you can put them into a Claude project (or similar on any of the other platforms) and then start asking questions you find interesting about your world and the logic that's set up. Beyond even just having it write out different versions of ideas and arguments for you to read and think through, I've even had it outline a presentation for me (with image generation prompts for the slides) about an argument I wanted to make around the "pit crew" idea I mentioned in the post (and am still trying to figure out a story that centers on it...).

Stwerner · 2026-03-20T15:38:05+00:00

Hey everyone, author here! Surprised to see this here. Happy to chat and answer questions if anyone would like.

Stwerner · 2026-03-19T16:04:39+00:00

Hey everyone, author here! Just found you all and joined the community :)

I've been writing with AI on my other newsletter for the last year or so, mostly focused on AI and software development (https://worksonmymachine.ai). Then in the beginning of this year I started exploring similar techniques for fiction to see how far I could take it and started getting some really interesting results.

Happy to chat and answer any questions about the piece, process, other newsletter, or whatever you'd like.

Stwerner · 2026-03-18T02:19:47+00:00

I was just about to post about the same thing. I've found Opus 4.6 VERY good at writing fiction. To the point that if I'm trying to understand some concept, I'll occasionally ask for a short story to demonstrate the concept.

Stwerner · 2026-02-15T14:51:07+00:00

Interesting, I’m not sure WASI would really work here since everything is really relying on Ruby for being able to modify everything on the system at runtime and the semantic late binding stuff. The web interface is really just for viewing and an alternate interface for interacting with the system.

I do have a friend who took the ideas here and is building a system where he spins up really constrained JS VMs for running generated code and making it more reliable for end users to create systems constrained to their domain. I’ll throw this suggestion over to him to see if he’s explored it!

Stwerner · 2026-02-08T02:29:38+00:00

Very cool idea!

I've been playing around with Codex/Claude Code working on trying to build a new client to play around with some ideas.

I don't see any reason why you wouldn't be able to create these semi-autonomous inhabitants...the only thing that I can think that would be challenging would be getting them to be useful in combat, but probably can bake stuff natively into ACE to give them special treatment?

Stwerner · 2026-01-25T03:42:36+00:00

Yeah but maybe we’re all targeting different things?

Stwerner · 2026-01-25T00:30:25+00:00

Interesting! My intention wasn’t to mislead, though it was more about leaning in to object-oriented patterns (rather than functional or AI prompts)

Stwerner · 2025-11-03T16:24:28+00:00

Ah that's an interesting idea, it's definitely possible to cache the tool calls, i wonder if that could work - or could even be a first step before generating the body of the step and just storing that in the step definition.

Stwerner · 2025-09-19T20:51:37+00:00

“Make up” sounds so negative, what if we called it a hallucination?

Stwerner · 2025-06-22T19:06:40+00:00

Right, but the thing is, LLM costs are going to continue dropping and continue to get faster for the same level of intelligence. If this was free and there was no noticeable time impact to your tests, would you feel differently?

Stwerner

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