Nerd Notes, March

Alright alright nerds…there’s a lot bouncing around inside my brain. Let’s get into it…

Adventures in Vibecoding

For the last week or so, I’ve been building something on Replit. The background: after the first playtest of Oldies But Goodies, one of the ideas that came out was that it would be easier to manage if it was a mobile app…and that made a lot of sense. Having to setup a bunch of physical cards and carry them around in a bookstore was kind of cumbersome.

And I’ve kind of been looking for an excuse to see just how much the latest generation of AI code tools can actually do, because I’ve had this lingering suspicion that 3 roles that currently make up a product team in a lot of tech companies - engineers, designers, and product managers - might be compressed into a single role for a lot of software that doesn’t have particularly novel functionality…so this was my opportunity to figure out how real that hypothesis might be.

If you’re curious, I’ve got a pretty basic prototype live (I’ve renamed it to Read Me Like A Book, a suggestion from my friend Mehdi).

A process note: I didn’t write any code for that or do any of the interface design. I wrote up some natural language functionality using Replit Agent, and then refined what the agent produced, added in new pieces, and rinse repeat.

Some quick thoughts then:

• I’ve played around with Replit off and on for the past couple years. What you see in that first prototype was not possible even like 6 months ago.
• That said, I still don’t know if it’s at the level where a total layman could make something like that. The ability to describe and specify what you want and a foundational understanding of how software works still feels like the barrier to entry.
• I also don’t know how well this would do if I was trying to build new features within a large existing code base. Starting from scratch with no legacy infrastructure to worry about knocks out a big chunk of potential problems. And I’m not sure if something like Copilot does enough to collapse the distinct roles on a product team. These are things still worth exploring.
• I don’t know where the upper limits are of how functional or how usable I can make this. Can I build in some social features and some game mechanics like opening card packs? Can I incorporate some game like interaction design? I suspect the answer is yes.

Personally, I don’t think this is a “robots are coming for the jobs” moment…though I do think it might be a redefinition of what new roles will be created in tech. I remain in a curious and exploratory mode, and in terms of the ability of people to create interesting, meaningful things I find all of this promising.

Pokemon Day

I went to my first ever Pokemon Day this year. Apparently, the first Pokemon video game was released on February 27, so that’s the official day of celebration where fans get together at game shops, there are special promo cards & prize packs, and the Pokemon Company makes a bunch of announcements about what’s coming in the future.

I’m always supportive of events that bring enthusiasts about a hobby together, and I’m in that window of time that I know will soon close in which my children actually want me to participate in things with them, so we rolled up at the Joker - a game shop that we first discovered in 2019, back before we even were contemplating living here…and which I remember going to as tourists, and the guy running the shop telling us to come back that evening to play games with other people, and which at the time I thought was kind of extraordinary and turns out to be totally ordinary. I remain in awe that basically every modestly sized Dutch village has a board game shop, and Utrecht has like 6 of them in a 200m stretch.

But I digress…

The community turned out. People baked special treats. There were some costumes. Mostly, there were people trading cards and playing cards together. It was pleasant.

As far as the announcements, it seemed much more geared to the videogame players - there’s a new generation of the game coming which takes place in the Pokemon world’s equivalent of Paris, and that looks nice…if that means we get a world championship in Paris in the next few years, then I’m all for it. For the card game, the big news is that Mega Pokemon are coming back - essentially, super bulky, super powerful Pokemon that give up 3 prize cards when knocked out. Meh, it’s fine. When we started playing the game, there were VMax Pokemon which were basically the same concept. As long as they keep the format balanced so you don’t have to play the Megas in order to stay competitive…and right now, I think the game designers at Pokemon have earned that trust.

How Ryuki won

So if you saw this month’s Pursuit of Play, you know that the European Championship was decided on a donk, and kind of a weird donk at that. Usually if there is a donk, it comes from the player going second because that player is allowed to attack on their first turn. The first player has to brick and not be able to put a 2nd pokemon in play on their first turn. In this case, however, the winning player went first and knocked out the opposing player’s pokemon without the opponent even getting a turn and without attacking. So let’s break down exactly how that happened. The key cards are in the gallery:

• Ryuki opened the game with Oranguru V in the active spot. That Pokemon has an ability that lets it search the deck for 2 tool cards - cards that get attached to a Pokemon and give it some sort of special ability. Ryuki used that ability to get out a Forest Seal Stone and an Ancient Booster Capsule.
• He then attached the Forest Seal Stone to the Oranguru. That gave the Oranguru a onetime ability to search the deck for any one card. He used the ability immediately.
• With the Forest Seal Stone, he found the Precious Trolley. That is an ACESPEC card - a card so powerful that every player can only have 1 ACESPEC in their whole deck. The Precious Trolley lets him fill up his whole bench with basic Pokemon.
• Ryuki grabbed 4 Pokemon, each of which let him do something to make the donk possible.
• First, he got the Brute Bonnet and attached the Ancient Booster Capsule (that he got from the Oranguru’s ability). That gave him the ability to poison both active Pokemon. A poisoned Pokemon gets hit with 1 damage counter at the beginning of every turn for both players.
• Then he got the Radiant Hisuian Sneasler, whose ability hits his opponent’s poisoned Pokemon with 3 damage counters instead of 1.
• Then he got the Pecharunt, which has an ability where if it is in the active spot it increases the poison damage by 5 damage counters.
• Finally, he got the Latias ex. That gives all of his basic pokemon free retreat.
• Using the Brute Bonnet, he poisoned both active pokemon.
• Then, using the Latias’s ability, he retreated the Oranguru and put the Pecharunt into the active spot.
• Then, he ended his turn.
• At the beginning of Natalie’s turn, her active Dreepy was poisoned. So it took the regular 1 damage counter plus 2 more from the Sneasler’s ability, plus 5 more from the active Pecharunt’s ability. 80 damage in total. The Dreepy only has 70 hit points. It was knocked out, and with no benched Pokemon, Natalie couldn’t promote anything from the bench to the active. An automatic loss before she ever had a chance to do anything.

The outcome of this match has been mildly controversial within the PTCG community. Some people think that it shouldn’t be possible to win before the other player gets to take a turn…Me, I’m OK with the idea that it can happen given a fairly extraordinary sequence of events. If this was an effect from a single card, then yeah I get that. The truth is that if Ryuki hadn’t started the Oranguru, and if Natalie had been able to put more than 1 Pokemon in play from her hand before Ryuki’s turn, this wouldn’t have happened. And in 1 month’s time, it becomes dramatically more difficult because the Oranguru, the Sneasler, and the Forest Seal Stone all rotate out of the standard format. It will only work with Pokemon that have 50hp or less. I imagine if we asked Natalie, she’d tell you she know it was one of the risks with her deck build that was outweighed by some other benefit.

Stockholm on the horizon

We’re bringing back Tsareena!

A funny thing has happened…if you take a look at the Japanese City League, which is often predictive of where the game is headed in the rest of the world as cards release earlier in Japan, Tsareena decks are showing up in top 16s from time to time. It’s still not a meta deck, but it can play a lot more aggressively now than it could at the beginning of the season.

The biggest change I’ve made in the deck is bringing in the Dusknoir line. This funny little Pokemon can blow itself up to deal 130 damage to any 1 of the opponent’s Pokemon. This does give the opponent a free prize card, but there are lots of times when the math still makes that a favorable trade because I can give up 1 prize and take 2…and also, it’s still my turn so I still have an attack. 5 and 6 prize turns are going to be rare, but early game knockouts are very much in play.

And also, I haven’t had that much time to play lately, so I haven’t really had it in me to test out a new deck. And Tsareena is fun! Wish me luck.

Back again next month. If you play around with Read Me Like A Book, drop me a line and let me know what you think.