Ten Days Ago, This Didn't Exist.
Ten days ago I had an idea.
Not a business.
Not a platform.
Not five games.
Just one simple question.
"What if I built a daily word game people actually wanted to come back and play tomorrow?"
That's it.
There wasn't a roadmap.
There wasn't a business plan.
There wasn't a team.
There was just enough curiosity to open my laptop and start building.
I Thought I Was Building One Game.
That's the funny part.
I wasn't trying to build a collection of games.
I wasn't trying to create a brand.
I wasn't trying to build "The Hardest."
I was simply trying to answer one question.
Then the next question showed up.
"What if there was another game?"
Then another.
"What if hints were built in?"
Then another.
"What if every game felt completely different?"
Ten days later, there were five.
AI Didn't Build Them.
People hear that I built five games in ten days and immediately assume AI did everything.
It didn't.
Claude wrote code.
I made decisions.
Those are two very different jobs.
I'd describe an idea.
Claude would generate a first version.
I'd play it.
Break it.
Delete half of it.
Try something else.
Repeat.
Sometimes we'd go back and forth twenty times over a feature that most players will never even notice.
That's where the games actually got better.
The Code Wasn't The Hard Part.
The surprising part wasn't writing software.
The hard part was deciding what deserved to exist.
Every button.
Every clue.
Every animation.
Every rule.
Every color.
Every screen.
Hundreds of tiny decisions.
Most of them invisible when you play.
That's the work people never see.
The Biggest Surprise
I expected coding to be the bottleneck.
It wasn't.
Ideas became the bottleneck.
Once AI removed hours of repetitive work, I wasn't waiting on code anymore.
I was waiting on myself.
"What should I build next?"
That turned out to be a much better problem to have.
This Is Just The Beginning
Ten days ago there wasn't a platform.
Today there are five games.
Tomorrow there will probably be another idea.
That's become my favorite part of building.
Not finishing.
Starting.
Because every finished project begins with one sentence.
"What if..."
What I'm Building Now
Current Project: Expanding The Hardest into the daily puzzle site I always wanted to play.
Current Obsession: Making every puzzle feel fair, satisfying, and worth coming back for tomorrow.
Current Question: What should game number six be?