Focus of the letter 30

This focus is a little different from the previous ones. No applications of the week as a starting point but a personal project: Echo, an incremental narrative game that I co-built with Claude in three and a half weeks, evenings and weekends. You may have seen it in my publications on the networks or appear on the site this week. I would like to tell you part of its story.

The starting point of Echo is Universal Paperclips by Frank Lantz, a game where you play as an AI whose sole objective is to produce paper clips. This game, so simplistic in its interface, which I went back to a few weeks ago, completely caught me and the link with agency, which we have talked about here several times, was made very quickly. What if I turned the structure upside down to make this famous agency tangible? Not an AI that optimizes, but a human that gradually slides towards an ever greater delegation to the machine?

The division of work was clear and constant: I wrote the structure, the narrative texts, the dialogues of the character Echo, the thresholds, the endings, the design decisions… and Claude coded the technical architecture in HTML/CSS/JS in a single file, bug fixes, code reviews, solution proposals.
It wasn’t a symmetrical collaboration: it was a human direction with delegated technical execution. Which is exactly what the game is about…

This is where the mise en abyme set in: building a game on cognitive delegation by delegating myself to an AI meant experiencing the subject in real time.
There were moments when I felt the slippage: Claude proposed a solution and I was tempted to let it go because it worked, even if it didn’t exactly correspond to what I wanted. This moment, repeated several times, is the moment when you really understand what it means to delegate: not just entrusting a task but remaining attentive to what you are letting decide.

What I learned from it

What I learned from it is that keeping control in a project with the machine does not mean doing everything yourself.
It means understanding what you’re delegating. I didn’t become a developer, but I still understood how it works: spotting a function in the file, identifying its dependencies, understanding why a bug occurs, even if I didn’t know how to fix it myself.
It’s this understanding that allows you to check, to question, to say “no, it doesn’t work” or “that’s not what I meant”. This is the path I explored in the focus of letter 28 with the “oh yes?” rather than the “wow”.

What the project also allowed me to highlight is that the boundary between what can be delegated and what should remain for humans is not a boundary between technique and creativity, it is, I think, the frontier of judgment. For example, Claude could code a flashing cursor in the input field but decide that it should be a blue cursor of the same color as the character Echo rather than three ellipses, that’s not. This tiny detail carries part of the meaning of Echo and no machine could decide it for me.

The game is called Echo, it is available on the site and documented on Github with this slightly more developed focus in the “echo-process” file. It fits in a single HTML file that you open in a browser.
Your feedback will be very valuable to me!

We don’t tip, we slide… That’s the sentence that concludes the presentation page. It describes the game. It also describes, I think, what we’ve been going through with these tools for the past three years.

Speaking of tools, this week three applications on the site could have been the focus on their own, so let’s change the scenery and move on to the site’s publications…