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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  4d ago (text post)   348 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for October 20th, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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I have been making more progress on my eastern cultivation mod for Timberborn.

This is what the AI says has been accomplished:

We've accomplished quite a lot in Immortal Beavers:

  • Built a working C# mod with AI-assisted development.
  • Implemented cultivation progression: individual beavers advance to Qi Gathering, gaining major productivity and lifespan bonuses.
  • Created a meditation system with cultivation experience and wellbeing effects.
  • Built a functioning pill economy: refinery, Sustenance Pills, and dedicated storage.
  • Verified gameplay in Timberborn, including production, consumption, progression, and storage.
  • Established a sustainable AI workflow: Grok, Git, shared documentation, and smaller coding tasks to conserve tokens.
  • Researched existing faction mods and identified a practical route toward a standalone faction.
  • Redefined our roadmap around an entire cultivation civilization, including spirit stones, four energy-production methods, ley lines, and supernatural abilities.

Currently underway: Creating the playable Immortal Sect faction, initially based on Folktails.

In my mind the main achievements are figuring out the AI workflow. I have chatgpt doing quarterbacking. Used gemini briefly, blew through all the tokens twice now. Have a subscription to grok and its going ok in terms of token usage.

I feel the need to ask them to be careful and conservative about token usage. Like directing overeager interns that would gladly research an impossible software engineering problem for three months unless you tell them explicitly 'report to me every day about what you are doing, do not waste time on super difficult problems'.

This sort of thing feels basic. which is frustrating. it could be a basic prompt start for the models, but that doesn't serve their interests. so it becomes a basic 'if you care at all about money, you need to ask it to do this thing'.

the one thing majorly in favor of AI doing stuff is that it is fun. it feels like i am making so much more progress. i get to feel like a boss directing various AIs rather than a dumb peon figuring out the API for a random beaver game. This aligns with my advice on dieting, find something fun that you can easily continue doing, rather than a super optimal process that is hard to follow.

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