The Claw: Minions of Toil

The dungeon is still being built in public. This structured content stub gives The Claw a real route, manifest, and companion surface before the lesson text is fully written.

Expect the first lessons to emerge from the game-design research, the taxonomy work, and the exploratory builds happening in the course repo.

Lesson outline

1. Enter The Hollows — Install the skill. Your coding agent becomes a Zot. A dungeon generates. You're playing.
2. Give the Zot Hands — Add tools via defineCommand. The Zot can scry, inscribe, invoke — act on the filesystem.
3. The Zot Speaks — Wire the Zot to an LLM with AI SDK. streamText + tools. The Zot thinks, acts, narrates.
4. The Tick — Build the game loop. Services boot on the filesystem, produce output, depend on each other.
5. Services — Build services that run on the tick — database, webserver, monitor. Dependencies and cascading failure.
6. The Task Queue — A service that generates work. Tasks arrive in the inbox. The Zot processes them.
7. Chaos — The chaos agent breaks things. Delete pid files, corrupt configs, flood logs. The Zot must detect and repair.
8. The Grue — Unobserved destructive autonomy. Things you can't see will kill you. Build observability or die.
9. Resource Pressure — Every action costs tokens. Track real usage. The numbers are real. Learn when to act and when to conserve.
10. You Watch — The Zot runs autonomously. You set policy. The operator paradigm — manage, don't micromanage.
11. The Scorecard — The run IS an eval. Build the trace — commands, tokens, service health, encounter response time.
12. Your Zots Are Ready — Point them at something real. Or don't. They're Zots.