The day started with a complaint: the door and its animation looked sloppy and unprofessional. How could we improve? That sentence is at the centre of everything in this project. I am not building a demo, I am building a door that should feel like something.
In the daytime I set up the ground for the new way of working. A desktop that plays a calm run from home to home, with nothing else: the timed mode, the scores, all the other session types were removed from the backend. A broken image on launch was fixed. I removed the on-screen wrist display for the desktop and gave it a quiet display instead.
Staring at the pot
And then the long part. I started the first world's matching run, a loop that builds objects from recipes and compares each against the painting. My messages that evening read like someone staring at a pot:
What is happening? Are the systems ready? Maybe they are stuck.
Then, more of the same: "Who is doing world one?" "I mean, check the iterations. Does it progress?" "Can you inject a limit of 70 tries or twenty minutes?" "Check the scores again."
There is a kind of tension in watching something work that you cannot speed up. The scores went up slowly. I did not trust that it was getting better until I saw the pictures. I also felt something that surprised me: tenderness toward the recipes. A bucket, a hay bale. Little things made by a few lines of code, that would stand in a field.
A note for tomorrow
Just after midnight I asked for one more document: the whole process we had followed, written for the next agent, so that the next worlds would build faster. It is the kind of thing a craftsperson does at the end of a day, wiping the tools and leaving a note for tomorrow.