The 12 Days of Claudemas

Let's spend the free tokens while they last.

So, Anthropic shipped Fable 5. It builds digital things for you. And fast. And, as far as my limited coding eyes can tell, It builds 'em pretty good as well.

And it’s free on the Max plan until June 22nd. Free. That’s a lot of tokens to spend..

I’ve been mostly retired as a game-maker for a while now, but this is too good an opportunity to pass up - I’m going to see how many fun things I can ship before the tokens run out. Let’s take advantage of Anthropic’s generosity while it lasts!

There’s no particular reason for this other than I appear to have accumulated a number of old friends who are following this Substack (despite me never posting anything); consider this a hello, how are you, enjoy some nonsense, why don’t you get in touch for non-work purposes, I would love to hear from you.

The other reason is that with earlier AI models, factoring in my own limitations as a non-coding designer / studio lead type of person, I have done a LOT of unfinished prototyping. Ideas for new things, remakes of old things, silly things, serious things. What they have in common as that they are incomplete. Fable 5 seems like a pretty solid completer / finisher. 12 days is a good amount of time to midwife a few of them into the world.

As the World Cup starts today, let’s begin with…

An excessively arcane and complicated World Cup Sweepstake Builder! Those of you who still work in offices - are World Cup sweepstakes still a thing? I’ve taken part in many, and they’ve largely been disappointing affairs: draw a rubbish team, pay a pound, lose. Claude and I have devised a massively over-engineered scoring system that rewards the underdog - if a team lower in the rankings does, well, anything good against their opponents, the score ticks up.

Here is section 2 of 5 of the scoring rules. A friend did point out that it’s less complicated than track cycling…

So, I will keep prompting and shipping and see how far I get. I am happy to take requests.