Where'd the posts go?

 As we close to the end of another year, I'm surprised that I haven't posted much here as the AI journey continues on.  Through AI.nstein I made some progress in mapping out AI possibilities and building a consulting arm, but didn't really take off. Shalom needed a new IT Manager, and it felt like I was the ideal candidate for the task at hand (to migrate almost all services over to a centralized system instituted by the Diocese). Fast-forward a year-and-a-half and here we are, reflecting on good 2025. 

I'm surprised how little I use AI at work, less than 10%. There's still a mighty shift coming, but the day-to-day minutiae and processes aren't really amenable to AI just yet, although I did manager to build out an entire app to handle power pack loans. 

Where AI has flourished is at home building out small little projects that have tickled the back of my mind or had previous prototypes done. With the help of predominantly Firebase Studio, I have built out enhanced prototypes of:

• Factor Friends: Quick prototype of a known game, built in under 2 hours.
• Adaptive Grids: A few attempts at getting the random terrain generation working using Temporal ROAM and adaptive grids. I'll definitely come back to this one.
• SudoCraft: A Sudoku puzzle maker. Allows "unsolving" and validating partial puzzles. Working enough for a proof of concept but needs fleshing out. 
• Dueling Coasters Sim: a non-web-app simulation of my Dueling Coasters boardgame (should do a full post on that later).
• First the worst: Quick web variant. Didn't work as good as hoped, so made a TTS Mod of First the Worst instead
• Drover's Run: A boardgame on droving cattle in the queensland outback destined for the TGDA aussie-made award. After a single paper prototype, it was easier to build out a complete web app rather than attempting to get the fiddly bits into Tabletop Simulator. 
• Dwarven Abbey: a game/concept where you get to explore the world through wiki-like articles, then choose to expand the world by choosing between 2 generated texts. Another needing a full rundown. 
• TournamentCompare: I'm using the previous work on TounamentCompare to build a series of YouTube videos about creating web apps with Firebase Studio. Hopefully want it to build a GUI to help visualize and snap together matches and rounds to create varying tournament formats to compare. More to come ...
• SimpleQuorum: A quick app to test the viability of building production-level voting for small non-profit orgs.
• Tidal Sweep: a simple minesweeper logic puzzle about fishing. When you're close to a fish you get "nibbles", the bigger the fish, the bigger the nibble. Got to click right on the mouth to catch. I designed it on the way up to Mackay and built out the first prototype in Excel (it was open on my work laptop and didn't have internet while driving).  Prototype 2 was in Firebase studio and is currently releasing now (just waiting for google TXT records to verify). Game is logically complete but will need a few more UI passes before going mainstream. 

The rate of app development is getting way quicker now, and we're living in a golden age where good ideas can be converted into apps without much effort. As an example Tidal Sweep, the most recent app, is only sitting at ~2 hours of dev time from project spec to first playable prototype (1.5 hours of that was on the project spec, which is definitely worth getting solid first up), then another 5 hours enhancing as we all played it over the weekend. The last hour was really just fiddling around with minor UI fixes to get ready for a more widespread release. I'd expect I'd have to spend 60-90 hours to get the 6,200 lines of code done. 

... And there's still more apps to come.