I began this project as an exercise to learn Go before starting a new job, then continued it as an exercise to mess about with Claude Code. So development was LLM-assisted: the UI is 100% vibe-coded, the model is 100% vim-typed, the rest is a mix of both.
Online play does not require signup etc. Instead I create an ephemeral session when network games are created/joined and those sessions are deleted at the end of the game. Leaderboard state is entirely local.
Because the backend runs on a small instance, I've been quite aggressive with connection management. If the server goes a minute without hearing from a client (turn or heartbeat), it ends the game and awards the win to the opposing player.
It was a pretty fun project to work on, and I definitely wouldn't have finished it without the crutch of Claude Code to push me through some of the schlepp.
