updownonly.com : Building my own crypto mobile game [part 2]
Development Day 5
Today was button day … again.
I spun up a brand new chat, outside of the project context to see if Claude could think more out the box without his previous history limiting his creative vision.
The same button brief. The same inspiration images. The same sample code.
Or at least much closer to it.
However, I still wanted those retro gaming style buttons so I persevered….
My main changes were that I wanted a white outline and for them to be more pixelated. Claude took me on another frustrating button creation journey of 7 rounds of designs.
At this point I was finding the button saga too much so paused to write day 1 to 5 of this blog piece as a reprieve.
Then back to it with the updated file for the buttons and time to see how the UI was looking. It needed some tweaks to the starfield background which had become a weird dotty mess but it was looking good. So my approach of having the components in the project knowledge was working well for saving progress! Now was the time to take it outside of Claude and get my developer environment set up to channel my inner engineer!
Luckily Claude is very good at handholding through the process and my time as a product manager around engineers has rubbed some engineering knowledge off on me so I started to install the various packages and dependencies, create various files in VS code, and copy and paste a bunch of code to get things set up to use React. This would allow me to more my code outside Claude and into a local environment where I could see the changes in real time.
So now was the time to ‘npm run dev’ and see if I was able to call the CoinGecko API successfully.
I wasn’t.
I updated the files. I deleted the dependencies. I reinstalled packages and updated the files again.
Red screen after red screen.
We restarted from scratch with template files and finally the red screen of errors was replaced with a template screen. Success was closer.
Or so I thought.
But despite what we did (uninstalling everything, reinstalling it all again, updating config files, changing file names etc etc) nothing would move this page from just the template.
In the end despite Claude’s attempts to troubleshoot, I hit the usage limit and the 5th day of development was up.
So far my experience of being a co-pilot engineer has been a lot of copy and pasting, typing commands into a terminal (I now know that ‘pwd’ tells you what directory you’re in, if you want to get your dev environment going you do ‘npm run dev’ and if you want it to stop you do ‘q + enter’) and lots of asking Claude what the cause of an error may be only to find that wasn’t it and you’re still no further forward.
Development Day 6
This day started was a rollercoaster of progress.
After installing dependencies, reinstalling them, updating config files and copy and pasting into every file, I FINALLY got my dev environment working! Whoop
Only it looked like this:
So not exactly the UI I had been expecting to see.
Despite some back and forth with Claude where he just kept suggesting I re copy and paste all the various files, I still couldn’t get from this jumble of components into the game interface I had been designing. As with most development days I ended up hitting Claude’s limit with little to no progress. Although a working dev environment was a minor step forward.
However when I hit the Sonnet model limit on Claude I decided to forge on with the less powerful Haiku model. What a mistake. 2hours later my dev environment was completely broken and unable to be fixed as Claude had me in a loop of trying to update my package.json only for my terminal to keep shouting red at me because a “:” had been found.
Sonnet Claude would need to come to the rescue on the next development day.
So far the experience did not have me planning to replace my engineering teams with AI. It had been disappointing progress so far on the game.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
