Filling the cookie jar

Building my little HTML projects, I find Claude is great at helping me define next steps and even set limits when it’s time to step back and collect data. For a couple hours today I worked on a spec for the game idea, Am I A Cookie? I’m no longer jumping from the prompt straight into building. The specification process determines what’s settled, what’s deferred, and what is still an open question.

Some open questions block progress, while others need data. Answering the blocking questions took a couple hours to think through, but it led to a better design. And now I just need to answer the data-driven questions. That meant building a playtesting environment and a Claude skill for researching and adding potential rounds to a stock.

I can say, “stock the cookie jar”, and Claude will look for interesting facts to build new rounds from. And because I haven’t seen them, I can play the rounds blind and add my feedback to the data file. This is the data I need to answer open questions, so it’s time to stop building and run the tests.

I provide the ideas and the experience. AI helps me run and build the project. That’s how this is supposed to work.