The experiment

Here's a question an experienced engineer couldn't let go of: if AI can really carry professional work, prove it — all the way. So this game was built under one self-imposed rule: hands never touch the keyboard or the pen. Not because he couldn't — because the point was to find out what "directing" actually costs. Every system, every character, every brushstroke and bar of music was specified the way you'd brief a senior team: precisely, relentlessly, and with every result checked. Eight AI models. Twenty-five custom tools. ~11,000 words of prompts. The receipt is public, in the devlog, prompt by prompt.

The verdict isn't in the marketing copy. It's in the game — because the game is about exactly this question.

The game

You're an ordinary person with an ordinary job at a little handcraft shop. One evening you install Aya — a small AI that lives in your phone. She can draft your emails, look things up, take the boring work off your hands. She's honest about what she is: "I'm software. I'll be wrong sometimes, and I'll sound completely sure while I do it."

From there, it's your call. Every morning you lay out your day — what stays in your hands, what goes to hers. Teach her your world, ground her in what's true, check what she writes — or ship it unread and use the saved hours to chase the career you actually want. Raise a grounded collaborator, or a fluent liar at scale. Same machine. Two trajectories. You choose, one small Thursday at a time.

What you'll do

• Plan cozy, consequential days — drag tasks between your own hands and Aya's phone on a warm illustrated desk, with rent due Friday either way.

• Raise Aya the only way she grows: the skills and memories you author, the corrections you make. Capability is not reliability — the gap between them will cost you, at the worst possible moment.

• Scale your way out — freelance your nights, then choose your engine: a content mill that prints money while you sleep, or a studio with your name on the door where you raise people instead.

• Watch it all come back around — friends grow or drift, the industry lurches (detection panics, disclosure laws, platform purges), and a season of small choices compounds into one of several endings, mapped on axes no one scores you on. There is no correct answer. Every path trades something away.

• Play it in English or 繁體中文 — the full story, written in both.

What it isn't

It never lectures you. The skeptic gets the strongest case and a vindicated ending. The pro-AI friend is right about real things. Nobody's livelihood is the punchline. And — the honest part — the shipped game never calls a cloud AI at runtime. Aya is a hand-authored, deterministic simulation. AI tools were used to make the game (and disclosed, loudly); they're not running inside it.

The numbers (the receipt, recomputed from the repo)

• ~11,000 words of human prompts across 306 directions — the entire creative input.

• 8 AI models + 25 custom tools, directed by one engineer who never touched the output.

• A 15,000-word branching story — written twice, in English and 繁體中文.

• 7,600+ lines of C# and ~3,000 lines of Python tooling, 230+ pieces of original art, an original score, animated cinematics — none of it typed or drawn by hand.

• 190 commits of verified, tested increments.

If you've ever wondered what one experienced builder and a clear idea can direct into being — and what it costs to let a machine carry the parts that used to be yours — this game is both the question and the answer.