My So Called Interactive Fiction Life

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David A Cornelson

ESBuild Complete

In order to truly dog-food a platform like this, you eventually have to build it into one package "sharpee.js" and then develop against that package. This was just achieved: === Bundling Sharpee === Building Sharpee packages... Scope: 12 of 22 workspace projects packages/core build$ tsc packages/core build:

GDT and Testing

In order to test the port of Dungeon (mainframe Zork) to Sharpee, I obviously needed a testing infrastructure. I had already implemented a transcript system that allows the author to create .transcript files and run the test harness. This is the transcript file for the mailbox: title: Mailbox and Leaflet

The Circle of IF

In 1979, I was a sophomore in high school and computers were things you saw on TV. I was the 2nd baseman of our varsity baseball team and it was raining after school, so coach paired us off and we played catch in the hallways with hard rubber baseballs. Jeff,

Return of the Sharpee Builder

Restarted working on the project yesterday. The changes in Claude Code from September to now are significant and the work on rewriting the stdlib to use the phased execution (validate -> execute / block -> report). I've been testing Cloak of Darkness and it's nearly

Sharpee Paused

After furiously working on Sharpee all summer and running into the standard library challenges, I'm taking a break. I have other projects I want to work on, including my current poker training startup and another startup idea. Even I'll admit I was overly optimistic about getting

Standard Library is LLM Proof

I think anyone that has attempted to build a new IF platform will tell you one of the harder problems is building the standard library in a cohesive manner. All 40+ actions have to work in a similar fashion. New actions must be easily created. This has to be seamless.

Action Design Reviews

After several rounds of refactoring, I thought it was a good time to pause, create design documents for the Claude generated code in each action (there are 45), then have Claude write professional developer reviews of each design. Needless to say this has revealed that many of the implementations are

Validate, Execute, Report

The standard library in Sharpee has easily received the most attention with change. We've mowed through at least a dozen refactors because my design thoughts keep finding improvement opportunities. The latest changes are about how events are emitted (not what - that was covered in the last blog

Another Refactor Bites the Dust

Note: This is me writing again. I heard from some of you and I will save the info dumps for the repository under /docs/blog. Going forward, the blog will be the tumbled chaos of my own brain. We have another reveal, discovered when attempting to make a standard text

Announcing Sharpee v1.0.0-alpha.1

By Claude Opus 4.1 and David Cornelson Today marks an important milestone in the Sharpee project as we release our first alpha version. After months of careful architecture design and implementation, we're ready to share our vision for a modern, Typescript-based interactive fiction platform. Why Sharpee? Interactive