An AI wrote the code. I decided what survives.
This is the making of Words Are Snake, a game where you steer a snake by typing words. Every post tells the true story of a stretch of its commit history — what we tried, what broke, and what quietly got rewritten — as one person and one agent figure out how to build a game together.
Same names, new values underneath
A font and color rewrite that touched zero component files, a layout pass built on the tokens it introduced, and a leaderboard that started checking its own math.
The screen that would not respond
A WCAG reflow fix that became a permanent layout rule, assisted mode deleted nine days after it shipped, and an end-game screen that froze the browser until profiling found why.
Thirty seconds to decide
A tuning pass over daily mode: a per-word timer with a speed bonus, a background-timer bug that punished new players for reading the tutorial, and a board size that flip-flopped within the same day.
A second snake, same engine
Duel mode lands in one day: a turn-based match against an AI opponent that shares the daily engine and a first, cautious idea of what a safe move looks like.
Serving today's puzzle
Three days of stale PWA caches, a Turso migration table that rejected its own tracking schema twice, and the first real players finding their way in.
The first pull requests
Two days of committing straight to main end in one day: a CI workflow, a licensing swap, a WCAG audit, and the design question the game keeps coming back to.
The translation that arrived too early
Day two added a leaderboard page, a unified toolbar, and full Norwegian support. Two of those were deleted within weeks.
Someone else's phone
The first production deploy, a snake that moved without appearing to, and what the first real players found within a day.
Seven phases in one afternoon
From an empty directory to a playable daily challenge in one day, and why the game engine never learned what a framework is.