The book¶
This is the living textbook of a small lab for LLM-native games — games where the model does something a decision tree genuinely cannot. If you are a grad student opening this a decade from now: the code shows what we built; this book exists to show how we came to believe it — the concepts, the beliefs that got falsified (kept as dated amendments, never rewritten), the design forks and what each cost.
How to read this site¶
The book is a spine, not a copy. Prose lives once; chapters narrate and link:
| what | lives in | the book's relationship to it |
|---|---|---|
| one-concept atoms (mechanisms, taxonomies, bites) | learnings | chapters cite them, never restate them |
| playtest results and belief-changing runs | ledgers | chapters point at entries, never re-quote numbers |
| load-bearing decisions | ADRs | chapters tell the story around the decision |
| citations | literature index | the bibliography gives reading order; DOIs only, no PDFs |
| what to build and why | vision · spec | chapters assume you can open them |
Chapters are concept arcs, not chronology: each takes one idea from theory → the design it forces → what happened when we built it. The journey lives inside the arc.
Chapters¶
| chapter | arc | status |
|---|---|---|
| The no-machine | why the engine owns all dice — the anti-yes-and seam, from failure mode to first live refusal | written |
| Loaded dice | how to test a game of chance played against a language model — determinism at both seams | written |
| The clone-and-swap seam | why the engine knows nothing about hunker: manifests, tolerant views, and the second game that will cash the bet | queued |
| The hungry clock | the day-loop economy — AP as daylight, hunger counting up, and tuning scarcity until routes matter | queued |
| A game in the palm | phone-first as a forcing function — Tailscale, thumb-feel, and infrastructure that heals itself visibly | queued |
| The stack that shipped nothing | a process arc — six correct merges, an empty trunk, and what branching history says we should have known | queued |
Queued chapters get written at milestone passes, from the learnings and ledger entries accumulated along the way — never from memory.