Pandarine
Claude Code as a design partner, not a typist
Klomi is built with Claude Code in the loop, and the honest summary of what that changed is not "it types faster". It does. That is the least interesting part, and it is the part everyone talks about.
The document is the artifact
The game's balance lives in four Markdown files that get edited more often than the code implementing them: one for the numbers, one for the catalogue of 250-odd items, one for the open problems, and a plan file per rework. Working with the model means writing the argument out rather than holding it in your head, and the file that comes out is what the next session reads.
The problems file is a numbered list with a status on each entry — resolved, mitigated, still open. It is the closest thing the project has to a spine.
The earlier framing here was wrong. The cooldown is a deliberate time-gate: wait, or pay to finish early. The problem was never the rule, it was where the toll sat.
That entry is the whole case for this way of working. A model that agrees with you produces nothing. One that has to defend a written position against the code produces a revision you can act on — in this instance, moving the payment off medicine and onto the optional categories.
It writes from what it learned, not from what is true today
The repo carries a one-line instruction file, and it exists because of a failure: Expo has changed — read the exact versioned documentation before writing any code. A model's knowledge of a fast-moving SDK is stale by construction. Pinning the exact version of the docs is worth more than any amount of clever prompting.
What it is bad at
- It agrees. Left alone it will find a good reason for whatever you proposed; the counter-move is to make it argue the case it just lost.
- It is confident about numbers it has not read. Every figure in the design notes is checked against the config file, not against the paragraph above it.
- It writes plausible code for an API that changed six months ago — hence the instruction file.
A small studio and a machine that is only useful when it is contradicted. Everything here comes out of that arrangement: the game, this site, the generator that draws its pixel art, and this journal.