Triple use

For years I've been maintaining a scattered pile of tools. A text editor. A terminal. An explorer window. A browser. A DAW. A game engine with a separate project file per title. Each tool handed me back the same small complaint — this isn't quite mine — even when I loved the tool.

At some point this spring, after four months of watching an AI write most of my code, I understood what I'd actually been trying to own. It wasn't the code. The code can be written by anyone now. What matters is where the work happens: the environment, the physicality of place, the felt sense that this particular room was built for one person.

The game view above is the same game running in the window to the right. Literally the same instance. I grabbed a handle and dragged a copy out; the underlying engine is one frame loop rendering to two layers.

This used to feel impossible to me. Embed a game in an editor and you'd be reaching into the engine, bolting on a widget toolkit, shipping three rendering backends. But if the editor is running on the engine — if the sentence I'm typing right now is being laid out by the same code that lays out particles for the game — then "embedding" collapses to an element with different parameters.