Blog post #93

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Today David comes over to Hjärup for a full day together. We will look at the projects we are running, compare the AI tools we actually use, talk about what it takes to run your own company, and try to land a Vinnova application before the deadline in January. Instead of sending a list of bullet points, I spent the evening before turning the agenda into an arcade game.

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What shipped

• A one-page agenda in the style of a 1990s fighting game: a title screen, a character select with David as player 1 and me as player 2, and the day laid out as rounds and bonus stages.
• Two fighter cards with stat bars for agent power, product leadership, AI knowledge, founder experience and table tennis. Design and software engineering ended up as each player’s super move instead of a bar, because those are the things we each do best.
• The day itself: warm-up, a quest through our current projects, a weapon select for tools (Claude Code, Codex, Grok, Gemini, agents, scheduled jobs and second brains, working with goals), a combo guide for founders (consulting versus building our own products, networking, the academic world), and a final boss.
• The final boss is Vinnova, with a health bar, a deadline of 12 January 2027, four special moves and a 500,000 point bonus for winning. Lunch, a walk through Hjärup and table tennis are bonus stages in between.

Tooling & process

• Claude Code wrote the page and published it as a shareable artifact, then took one round of changes after another while I read it on the other screen.
• Every image came from Codex through codex exec with its image tool. I gave it our two portrait photos once, and it made the fighter portraits, a team picture with both of us facing the same way, and pixel-art scenes for every round. Later prompts used the first pixel-art image as a style reference, so the characters stayed recognisable from the walk to the boss fight.
• Claude Code ran several Codex jobs in parallel in the background and kept editing the page while they ran, then looked at each image before putting it on the page.
• Two small things tripped it up. codex exec -i takes several files, so it swallowed the prompt as another image path, and Codex refuses to run outside a git repository unless you pass --skip-git-repo-check. Piping the prompt through stdin fixed the first one.

Decisions made

• Same side, not versus. The first version had a big “VS” between the two of us, but the point of the day is to build things together, so it became co-op mode with a ”+” in the middle.
• The boss is named after the agency and nothing else. I first called it “the grant bureaucrat”, but we are both fine with bureaucracy as long as it is the right kind, so it is simply Vinnova.
• Images sit beside the text, not above it. Full-width art took over the page, so each round got a small picture on the side.
• Show, don’t tell. We will discuss and build proofs of concept all day, so that the workshop leaves real artifacts behind. The rig is set up in the kitchen.

What’s unclear

• Whether the stat bars survive contact with reality. My table tennis rating is higher than David’s on the page, and we will find out this afternoon.

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— Stefan