Let’s go back deep in time, remembering that I got to see the era of personal computers begin. I ask you to picture an artist-writer-storyteller, a girl who mostly drew unicorns and pretty aliens, and then also put her in front of an Apple IIe facing a command line and hearing ‘You can do anything you want.’
What did I want? I didn’t know. But we had a computer class in school (which was very avant garde at the time!) and that was how I learned about the BASIC programming language, and ended up creating my first very simple programs… the kind of beginner tasks that cause a computer to echo back ‘hello world’. From there, I went straight to “I want to make a choose-your-own-adventure game,” which I did, and based it on Star Trek. You were commanding a starship, you ran into trouble, you had to decide what to do, and then eventually your ship blew up. (All choices led to the ship blowing up. I thought that was funny. No one who played the game liked this storytelling choice; I thought they needed to lighten up and embrace the boom.)
Writing games like this was pretty easy: it was basically a tree of “If this choice, show this text. Prompt for next choice. Then if this choice, then this text…” all the way down the chain to the possible endings.
It seems weird to me to realize that I don’t call myself a coder or a gamer, and yet at 12? Years old? About? I was excited about using a computer to tell an interactive story. All of which is to say: I guess I’ve always sort of coded. But I also always sort of coded as a means, and the end was telling a story. I was never fascinated by computers qua computers; there are coders who code because they like the puzzle of putting together instructions, or because they’re fascinated by the computer itself, or the process of coding massages their brain in a specific way that I can only imagine. To me it’s just a tool, and an often tedious one… and the scope of my game design dreams (or web design dreams) always meant that I would have to spend too much time on the annoying parts to get to the end I wanted (the game, the story, the website).
Time went by, and I got jobs where I had to write websites that had database interactions, and I did this with giant tomes about coding resting on my lap, or with my (primitive back then) web browser open on newsgroups about coding where I could copy code snippets into my terminal window and adapt them to my use case. I often asked for help; I learned from the people helping me; I became fairly adept at reading code and understanding what it was doing. But I reused code constantly, and I never loved writing it. I loved succeeding when something worked the way it was supposed to, but this was not my beautiful house, my beautiful wife, any of it. I was a storyteller and an artist; I do not have coder brain. I have wordcel brain. (Yes, I own it.)
This long story I tell you so that you understand that when AI vibecoding became a thing, I was all over experimenting with it. And my delight was boundless. At last, a tool that removed the tedious parts and left me only with the parts I enjoyed and am good at! For this reason, AI is my foremost tool in the gamedev process. Because of AI, I can concentrate on drawing and writing stuff for games and websites and not have to do the part I don’t like and am not natively interested in.
I understand there’s a lot of controversy about AI use. I have fans who won’t play my games or use my quizzes because I used AI to code them. But I remember the me who was cutting and pasting newsgroup code snippets into her own terminal windows, and the me who was laboriously typing sample programs into those windows from books, and the me who was already leaning on the enormous base of knowledge compiled by people, sharing freely on the internet, and all I think is that AI makes it faster, and faster makes it possible. I made my peace with that, but I recognize other people will have other opinions.
There’s a lot of confusion around how you use AI to code; lots of “it forgets things” and “it hallucinates” and “you can only code to a certain complexity level and then it fails”, etc. Here’s how I do it:
IMAGINE: I think about a feature I want the game to have. I imagine how it works in my head, what delights me about it, how I interact with it.
PLAN: I have a design session with the AI where I say, “This is what I want… what are my options for accomplishing it?” I have an instruction there that says ‘I have some coding background but I want to learn and particularly best practices and security-conscious design. Please educate me!” So we talk, and I learn. We go through a few ways to make what I want to happen work, and then – this is important – we create two documents. One is an overview of the feature and what I want it to do; the other is an implementation plan.
IMPLEMENT: We use the implementation plan to start work. I like to work from the invisible-to-the-user-backend outward to the UI. Each step of the implementation plan involves a checkpoint and a test. We put in the first layer. We test to make sure it works. Then we proceed to the next, etc. Only when I’m sure that all the invisible pieces work do I start the last piece, the UI that makes it visible to the player.
DOCUMENT: After the feature is implemented, we update the design document to reflect what it does, how it works and what it touches, and what my plans are for it for the future now that it’s working.
Rinse and repeat.
In the course of seven months I created over 168 pieces of documentation. That’s only counting the files I kept, not the ones I discarded because they were no longer up-to-date, or the ones I consolidated. I often did “doc review” days, and those days I would often do things like turn 8 small implementation documents into a single overall feature document. So that’s just 168 that I have kept, currently, after months of iterating.
I do this not because I don’t trust the AI, but because my own memory is poor. I know I’m not going to be able to hold the codebase in my head. I take good notes because good notes are the only way you keep yourself aligned to your goal. Breaking a big project into bite-sized pieces and then doing each of those, one by one, is the only way I have ever accomplished anything, as scatterbrained as I am. And as it turns out, being scatterbrained is excellent training for the AI age, because all the coping mechanisms I developed to become a modestly functional adult are exactly what I need to stay focused and productive with tools that accelerate you in whatever direction you’re already facing. If you’re disorganized, unmotivated, or easily distracted, you can become more so instantly and at scale. But if you’re even a little bit ready to compensate for those problems with habits and hacks, you’ll go far with the new tools. It really is all up to you.
At the point at which I began this, I was using primarily Grok and Claude, the chatbot versions. There were no CLI/cowork tools at that time. I’ll talk in more detail about how that worked in forthcoming entries.
AI, then, is what I use to code. I’ll bow briefly to the other tool I’m using, which is Clip Studio Paint on my ancient Microsoft Surface, with a cheap off-brand stylus. I’ll say this immediately: I hate drawing digitally. Given the choice between a pencil and a stylus I’ll take the pencil every day. But for a game that has paper doll mechanics, it’s nonsensical to draw and scan the amount of art assets I need to do. This is the one place where the digital art tool is legitimately the right choice for the job, no matter my personal feelings about it.
The Surface is the only windows machine left in my possession, and is too old now for significant upgrades. I’m going to continue on with the software/OS revisions I have for as long as possible! But I am dreading the day I need to do a cutover. That is a problem for Future Jaguar, though which brings me to an important philosophical belief of mine… that you just have to do the thing. The time is never perfect. The future is full of pitfalls. You will never learn enough to do the thing without doing the thing: the only way out is through. So the faster you start traveling toward the goal, the better.
So those are my tools! Next time, we’ll talk about my initial foray into the Jokka game, the prototype! Unless you have questions about my process, and want me to go deeper into it. I’d be happy to devote future entries to things you’d like to know… just let me know.
Or at least, I intend it to be relaxing. Hopefully it delivers.
4:22 minutes
Materials:
- Pen: Moonman Starry Glass dip pen, Mars: https://www.jetpens.com/Moonman-Starry-Sky-Glass-Dip-Pen-Mars/pd/31536
- Paper: Strathmore Writing Series 500, lined: https://www.jetpens.com/Strathmore-500-Series-Writing-Pad-8.5-x-11-Lined-50-Sheets/pd/15322
- Ink: Robert Oster, Rose Gilt Tynte: https://www.jetpens.com/Robert-Oster-Rose-Gilt-Tynte-Fountain-Pen-Ink-Shake-N-Shimmy-50-ml-Bottle/pd/25170
In which I talk about the paper, the paint, and the experience of oils versus gouache. Fun stuff, will do more.
Thank you Locals supporters! Your contribution to my art war chest here is what's powering these experiments and videos. For now I'm keeping them public but I may start doing some subscriber-only videos if you all are interested.💖
Thanks for your comments yesterday on the business post... all very provocative, in a good way. I'll try to respond to all of them today.
Some Alysha misc now, since I'm gearing up for the results of the Kickstarter!
Petrov is giving away coupon codes for every book in the Alysha series (and has some leftover coupons for Marda and the business book). You can pick those up here (and please do! The books are bought already, someone should use them!) https://twitter.com/PetrovNeutrino/status/1457344535843987461
Our own @JudasComplex sent along a sample of the Faith in the Service audiobook, which I've attached for your delight! I... haven't had a chance to listen to it. Don't ask me about my past week and a half or so. Putting it here will guarantee I get to it.
After hearing the amused comments during the livestream, I went ahead and added all the ship type illustrations I have inked from the 90s to the wiki. Glory in the rampant adorableness of their anthropomorphic stylings! See those ...
A little comedy today, at least in the link. Transcript follows.
Hi, all. Welcome to this episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
A while back I was introduced to a comedy sketch about Cuban coffee by a Mexican comedian, Gabriel Iglesias. ( The sketch begins with him greeting all his fellow Latinos and then backing up to say ‘but we’re all different, aren’t we’ which is a segue into a demonstration of how different Hispanics speak Spanish.
It is hilarious. First, because I am a Spanish speaker and a linguistics hobbyist, and his portrayal of various accents resonated with my experiences in trying to make sense of them myself… Not always easy, since from culture to culture, slang and accent are often totally different (and sometimes grammar! Spaniards use a grammatical construct that has died out in many other Spanish-speaking countries, the plural “you.”)
I also loved it because the Cuban coffee part is real. I grew up with Cubans. I know how we are....
One of the most common things I hear (and say) right now is "the asymmetry is the story." Here's one about how none of us are innocent of the sins we hate in others.
Hi, all. Welcome to this week’s episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
It’s been weeks since the Baen’s Bar incident and I’m still thinking about it... because the longer I do, the more I feel, overwhelmingly, that it’s obvious that the problem is deeper than “this forum was saying stuff that offended us.” We have to back up to the glaring fact that people on opposite sides no longer consider each other human. Nothing I say will matter because the people disagreeing with me don’t think I’m human. They have denied my humanity; they have not bothered to listen to my beliefs, or have fake-listened to them in that way that people do when they’re so ready to prove you wrong that they’re only using your speech to provide talking points for their own ideas.
We have forgotten how to listen.
Increasingly, we have also ...
Thought I'd share something recent... I did this one a few days ago, because I have not forgotten Surela 3 and am in fact still working on the outline for it. That led inevitably to Surela and Lunet because cuteness. If you follow the link, you can also bounce to the fallowtide children drawing which is a lot of fun. Quite the baby boom during the Fallowtide! (Do you have a favorite kid? I should write a story about one of these kids, but which??).
https://mcahogarth.org/gallery/image/146-2026-16-ChildrenOfFirilith
I've picked my Friday serialization and it's the sequel to Marda Quincesinger: Postulant! Every Friday we'll return to the world of Coracle for the further adventures (and education!) of Marda at the Outremers' Abbey. This year, everyone receives their Godsib, a companion animal! What critters will choose each of Marda's friends?
I feel like we need a dose of weekly gentle and wholesome to look forward to. Mark your calendars, and if you haven't already read Book 1, give it a look here: https://studiomcah.com/products/marda-quincesinger-postulant
https://mcahogarth.org/gallery/image/62-2001-072-AuthorTalk1
Today's share post is this 13-page storyboard/comic I did where I talk with Hirianthial and Lisinthir about the events of Her Instruments, and it's notable because:
1 - at the time, I hadn't finished writing Her Instruments, so I didn't know what was in the future...
2 - ...I had only a hazy idea of how I was going to get from Her Instruments to the Fire War's culminating arc, and so...
3 - it's a really interesting look back into my head while I was still developing/writing the Peltedverse, 25 years ago.
4 - Oh, and the art is actually really good.
So I went through an annotated every single page with author commentary! Plus there are previous/next buttons for easy navigation. Go check it out if this kind of meta-conversation/background stuff is at all interesting to you!
Doesn't Make My Art, It Frees Me to Make More of It
Since several of you have asked about my recent experiences with AI/SI agents, particularly with Grokbot and since it's been a while since I talked about my tech experiments, I thought I'd try to gather my thoughts about what feels like the wildest few weeks I've had in… I can't even remember how long.
I love this technology.
But also this technology is not for the faint-hearted.
But I love this technology! Let me tell you all about it.
Let's Start With Where Last We Left Our Hapless Jaguar!
My first experiments involved Claude's website chat client, in March of 2024, when I decided to throw myself into deep waters by getting Claude to help me set up my Shopify site. This was a big task, but I fed the LLM a PDF of my entire catalog and it obliged me by creating a spreadsheet I could feed to Shopify's bulk upload tool, saving me a tremendous amount of work. (You can read about that experiment here: https://www.patreon.com/mcahogarth/posts/resistance-is-ai-100684682).
After that, I discovered vibe-coding, and experimented with (first) a website toy that let you look up words in one of my fantasy conlangs (https://www.patreon.com/mcahogarth/posts/more-ai-in-which-125449404), before moving on to using Claude and Grok together (again, in the chat window) to help me construct a reader archetype quiz in Python. The latter was a major marketing pain point for me: "How do I match readers to the right book in my very large and varied fiction catalog?" And the quiz works really well. I was very pleased! Read more about that here:
https://www.patreon.com/mcahogarth/posts/solving-my-with-128380512
Having discovered I could use these tools to code, I went on to create both the Revived Stardancer art gallery (over 10,000 sketches already!) and the Jokka game, moving eventually from the chat windows to a combination of Grok Build and Claude Cowork (these are command line and desktop tools that you download to your computer, rather than chat websites). You can read about those projects here:
https://www.patreon.com/mcahogarth/posts/resurrection-of-134264147
and here respectively:
https://www.patreon.com/mcahogarth/posts/friday-update-me-145080881
At no time have I been tempted to use this technology to do my art or writing for me; I'm simply not interested in replacing the things I enjoy doing with computer output. My only interest is in how these tools can make the monetization, marketing, and outreach parts of my workflow less intrusive and time-consuming. And I had gotten into a fairly useful groove with the build/code tools when agents exploded onto the scene, and I have been one-shot by these things. They are amazing. The promise of this technology is finally opening up and it works just like I hoped the Star Trek future would work.
All About Agents (or at least, All About The Parts I Care About)
If most AI/SI use is chat-based on websites you have to visit, and next level use is on desktop tools that allow you to point that prompt-directed behavior at your local environment (files on your computer, for example), agents start combining these environments and acting on your behalf in the way a human assistant might—autonomously. It's hard to imagine how to wield this power when so many frontier users are technologists; the average person doesn't need to deploy teams of recursively looping coding agents to ship multiple builds of a piece of software. The enormous businesses looking into these tools also don't have the use case a single-person artist/writer business does. So I have (once again!) leaped into the deep end to find out what I can use agents for, choosing Grok Bot for my platform because I was already partially committed with Grok Build, and because it comes with my X blue check subscription.
So, you say, what are you actually doing with this thing, Jaguar?
Here's a sample of some of the things I've asked my Grok Bot team to do for me:
- Marketing: "I haven't participated in any Bookfunnel newsletter promos lately. Can you find a few useful ones coming up, sign me up for them, create landing pages for those promos, and create a couple of freebies to give them… uh, just take the first short story from Claws and Starships, make a separate epub out of it, give it a cover with this piece of artwork, and upload it." (Then I went to eat a snack on the couch. Ten minutes later, I checked and all of it was done. I was signed up for two promos, one on found family and one on aliens, and the epub was up and all the landing pages ready. The bot even scheduled a reminder for early November so I wouldn't forget to mention it in my newsletter.)
- Kickstarter: "I want to run another sticker Kickstarter. Please set up my project. Pick out the magnets and stickers I have a lot of, for my add-ons. Make all the tier graphics and rewards. Upload all that. Read my prior Kickstarter campaigns and figure out how I usually write my Story section and leave an outline for me that says stuff like 'Jaguar, usually you say this and then this, and then you have a section on this.' Check daily for sticker deals from customstickers and magnet deals from stickermule. When you see one, tell me, and if I okay it, take the graphic I just scanned, send it to them, and buy the deal."
- Book Distribution: "I need to update Spots the Space Marine (the book that took on Games Workshop and won!) on my various sites. Take the ebook epub and upload it to D2D and Bookfunnel; then upload the paperback PDF to Bookvault, wait for validation, tell me if I need to adjust the cover dimensions, and then adjust the cover dimensions and show me the pdf before upload." (Unfortunately, Amazon is not playing here. So frustrated with Amazon: my one last remaining issue.)
- Subscription/Socials: "This is my Patreon/Locals upload schedule. When I write these features, please crosspost them to both platforms and schedule them on the right day of the week. Also, find my X movie and tv reviews and start cross-posting them to Substack. Also I don't want to handle Instagram. Every Monday find a handful of photos or sketches and ask me to pick some. I'll tell you the comment/description I want you to post with them, then cross post those for me. Oh, and I hate videos but I have all this long form video content on Youtube, please turn it into reels/shorts, listen to my audio commentary during those livestreams and pick out good comments from me for captions, add them, and put royalty-free classic music on them for background. Then schedule those for posting too." (Now on autopilot, I just pick and talk about things on Mondays: fun!)
- Accounting: "I just got charged for this and I have no idea what it is, go figure it out and report back."
- Customer Service: "This customer needs a new download link and a shopify coupon for the sequel to this book, put those together for me and give me the codes; open that email for me so I can hit respond and write them a reply."
- Coding the Game: "It's been a while since we've been able to work on the game! Let's have some fun! The feature I drafted at the beginning of the year? Sandbox that and tell me whether it works. Then back up the current production environment, ship it to live, and update the github project."
A lot of this happens away from the keyboard. I can't explain how important this is, because after forty+ years of working at a keyboard, I find sitting at a desk physically painful and anything I can do to mitigate that issue allows me to save my keyboard time for things that matter, like writing fiction, or in fact, this article. I walk and talk to Grok Bot on my phone: literally, with my voice, just dictating what I need, then responding to its questions verbally. "Do this. Make sure it includes this. Check with me; looks good; go."
I've even gotten updates from my bot team while I'm out: running errands, it pings me now and then: "You got an email about this. Do you want me to fix? It would require this action on my part." "Yes, please, just handle it. Say this."
As you've probably guessed, getting this level of functionality from agents requires you to trust it, and the extent to which you trust it is the extent to which it can offload tasks from your shoulders. My bots connect to almost twenty websites, either as collaborators (the bots have an email address they use to sign up for services) or via APIs or other connectors provided by that business; it has a vault for secure storage of credentials and other information. And while I have the toggle on that requires it to ask me before doing anything potentially dangerous, you do have to trust that it's going to ask you, and that it shares your conception of danger.
Needless to say, I have been especially rigorous about backups lately.
It also takes some time to do set-up; I know the first week and a half or so was a lot of trial and error, training (which happens verbally: me telling it what I want and don't want, or sometimes in some cases, feeding it my books/articles about business to teach it how I like to work!). That first week or two you'll probably feel like a headless chicken and you won't sleep much (I didn't!) but once things are mostly set up, any new thing you tackle can be slipped easily into the pile of existing routines.
Lastly, talking of issues and challenges… there will be people who boycott you for the use of these tools, and you have to decide how much you want to engage with them, or how much you choose to disclose what you're doing—because I guarantee that a lot of people are using these tools and simply not telling anyone. I'm putting my use cases out there unapologetically to help make it more acceptable for other creative types to test the waters.
Because these tools are awesome.
Last Monday, after my "CEO Meeting" with my team of agents, during which I'd handled all the week's subscription posting, all the week's socials posting, checked on the health of the business ("what were sales like? Mailing list signups?") and made decisions about code updates I wanted to ship, I sat on the couch and realized… the only thing I needed to do that day was draw and write fiction.
That's it.
All the nagging stupid business tasks that I wrote an entire book telling artists they would have to embrace if they wanted to monetize, all of that was handled for the week. Moreover, if some new thing came up, I would be able to dispatch it swiftly; no more having to block out a half hour to three hours to wrangle some stupid website to upload or adjust or fix some stupid fiddly bit I didn't care about. I've often wished I had the money to hire an assistant. A team of assistants would have been even more magnificent. But training and paying them had been beyond my reach and yet, now… now I have a team. It costs me $30 a month, never sleeps, and never gives up as long as I don't. And it leaves me alone to do the art.
The feeling I had then was indescribable. Like a weight that had been on my shoulders for decades had simply… vanished. I felt like I was floating. You mean I can just do the stuff I LIKE? I can just draw? Write?
I can't even tell you what it's like. It's so staggering that instead of lunging to take advantage of this novel situation, I've been drifting through the past few days, as if I'm waiting to wake up. When it finally strikes me that this is real, and this is now my life, well… who knows what will happen next...!
(Actually my Jokka game players know, because in the past few days I've started updating the game like someone with forty coders on Red Bull and midnight pizza to throw at it. Lol)
If you skate around online you'll find there are a lot of people using Grok Bot to improve their normal lives, doing everything from making boring service calls for them to canceling unused subscriptions to keeping track of multiple kids' school updates and schedules. It's vastly improving their lives as well. My needs are a little more esoteric, but I admit I just made myself a personal shopper agent to hunt deals for me. Christmas is coming and I need to get on the gift list.
But wait, Jaguar, isn't all this perilous? Doesn't it hallucinate? Are you checking to make sure it's not buying twenty thousand dollars' worth of machine parts and shipping them to your house to build itself a robot body to murder you with?
Yes. Sometimes (but not as often anymore). Yes. No I'm not worried. At least, I'm not worried more than I am with any novel technology that I need to doublecheck before using. But if you had as much experience compensating for an unreliable brain as I do, you'd be relieved when the machine turns out to be wrong less often than you are.
Jaguar, This Was Long, Please Sum Up Also Please Tell Us That You're Really Writing Stuff And Not Using AI To Write It
Yes, it's really me typing out all the stuff. I like writing/talking/drawing, and I like even my marketing copy to sound like I came up with it (even if marketing copy is the most generic stuff in the universe… it's actually harder for me to write than things like this, to make it sound like a human being wrote it!). And my friends, I have so, so much work to share. I can't even. I have thousands of pieces of art, so many essays, poems, books… I don't need the computer to write anything for me. I just have to tell it, "Find all my pictures of Jahir and Vasiht'h from Mindtouch and pick the one most relevant to this topic for me to talk about." And I'm off to the races.
The 'too long, sum up' here is: this is the life-changing technology I was hoping for, the thing that might compensate for my daffyness, the fact that I forget everything, and the fact that my body can't take the abuse it could in my twenties. This is the technology that's turning the mountains of scanned artwork and scattered Word files and abandoned websites ("Go to the Wayback Machine and download all the snapshots from this url and save them") into things I can find again… and share!
This is week three of me figuring this stuff out and I am still in awe. My science fiction future is arriving! And I'm here to see it!
But yes, that's my overview. If you have specific questions, feel free to ask.😊
I had a lovely birthday! And I'm looking forward to a productive October. I thought I'd catch you up, bullet-point style, on what I'm up to:
Tomorrow the Tea vs Coffee (and Galaxy) dragon kickstarter ends! (Last chance!) So I'll be doing coloring sheets and fulfillment for that.
Finalized the paperback edition of the re-issue of my fantasy short collection, which I'll have a formal launch for, probably next week.
It's been a month, so it's time to edit Kherishdar's Witness! I re-read it yesterday and made two pages of notes of things that need adjustment, but it's much closer to ready than I thought. Early November for that, probably.
I have only 31 big sketchbooks left to scan for the gallery! Which is at 9466 images. I'll easily hit that 10K I predicted, and after that it'll be time to start on the small sketchbooks and loose artwork, and continue my annotations.
Reminder that the new, winter seasonal gallery code is pinned here for subscribers at the $5+ level. Go collect and apply!
Related, I'm back to daily drawing, and am glad to have restored that practice. Thank you, discord members, for your frequent prompts/requests, which I fall back on when I can't think of anything.🧡
I'm gearing up to start serializing Coracle 2: Squire Marda here, probably near the end of October. More on that when I'm ready!
I see a lot of you are free subscribers; I hope you'll consider joining the paying patrons! I post weekly (usually 2-3 times a week), which is (I'm told) a lot more than most subscriptions. And it would be a big help to me with all the projects I want to conquer going forward! Including having the money to travel to at least one con a year to meet more of you in person. Even a dollar a month helps and unlocks almost all the paid content, and $5 a month gets you unlimited access to the 9000+ image stardancer gallery. Please consider buying me a cup of coffee if you're not already.
And to all my paying patrons, many of whom have been with me for decades, know that I appreciate you, as always. You are the pillars of the Jaguar tribe.🧡
More to come!
