About

The interview

The AI I build Boulder with interviewed me for this page. It asked the questions. The answers are mine.

Choplifter and Lode Runner. What was the first computer in your house, and how did you end up in front of it?

I don’t know, but it was one of the Apple ones that required the big, like 7″, floppy floppy disks to run anything. I had to learn how to navigate in DOS to load anything on the floppies, so to play games like Choplifter or Lode Runner I needed the DOS nav abilities. I think I was somewhere around 6–8 years old doing this. The games were fun, so learning what I needed was easy enough. The computer was actually a work computer my dad had bought so he could do some of his work at home at the time. He used it most days, and I got to play on it only occasionally, and mostly on weekends.

Which game was the first to really eat your life? What’s the longest you’ve stuck with one?

The first game to truly swallow me whole was probably The Legend of Zelda, the gold cartridge version. I remember my mom showing me a bush that could be burned to get a secret room, and I spent the next, like, week burning every bush and bombing every square of rock to find everything in that game. I remember once running the game and collecting all the treasures in all the dungeons just to see how easy the game would be with everything from the start. The answer is: pretty easy, except for the final dungeon, because it is built for you to have most if not all of the stuff in the game.

The first game I truly 100%’d, I would say, was FF7. I played that game to the point of maxing the play clock on multiple saves, beating every Weapon, and breeding and S-tiering every chocobo. I got all three main characters I played with to max stats, and every Materia to master level. Even the Master Materia that gave you every spell and ability, I got 3 of them, all to the master level. I spent entirely too much time on that game.

WoW: Forever launches November 4. Why put this much into this game, instead of waiting for someone else to build the tools?

Every time I watched or played WoW (original BC launch, minus about a month, through to the Cataclysm launch), I had, or the people I watched had, like 5–10 addons that all did little bits of everything. So you spent a lot of time figuring out your UI and how it should look so you liked it. I have always wanted to just have like 1 master UI that does most of it, and then you can have 1–3 more for specifics. Like bag management, auction house tracking. Those seem like big ones I don’t think Boulder will touch on too much, so others can do those, but I want Boulder to do the heavy lifting and be the one addon that changes like 75% of the UI.

This started as a respawn timer for EverQuest Legends. How does a timer turn into a whole UI with a database behind it?

EQL only had a combat log. No other access to anything. Very limited addon capabilities. So as a beginner project to learn how to use Claude AI and Gemini, I chose something I thought was simple. It turns out that project became infinitely more complex too, and a lot of fun to build. But it gave me a lot of basic rules that AIs need, and how I need to not use certain areas of the English language because the results get confused. Then my friends told me about the WoW Forever beta launch, and that they and one of their guilds would be coming back to play, and I was in. I knew WoW was much more understanding and allowing of UIs and addons, so it changed from “how can I make this with what I have” to “what do I have, and what can I make with it.”

EQL taught you to stay away from parts of English because they confuse an AI. Which words did you have to stop using?

It isn’t specifically, like, what words don’t work. More of how to form the sentence so the AI will do the work I want done. Like, I would say a lot of things like how I talk. Kind of like how I am writing in here: it is how I would talk in a conversation. There are a lot of likes, some cussing, and some of the wording is quite nebulous on purpose. That kind of statement would either allow the AI enough freedom that it does something I didn’t want done yet, or it isn’t quite descriptive enough, so the task doesn’t quite get done how it should have been.

Describe the UI you see in your head. What does it give you that no addon out there does?

Really, I see most other UIs in what Boulder will look like. But it is what’s underneath that is different with Boulder. I want this to be a self-refreshing, self-building, self-sustained database that feeds everything in Boulder, from quest help to item locations. Drop rates to “I’m new, where do I train?” I want this to help answer everything, and hopefully, once completed, it will run and update and feed new database info to everyone on its own, with minimal or no touching, even from me.

You say you’re not a programmer. So what do you call yourself?

I see myself mostly as a General Engineer and Scholar. I love learning new things, and about stuff. One of my mottos in life is: I know enough about anything to get myself into trouble talking with someone who really knows anything about something. So I have a very wide and broad knowledge pool to draw on, but specialize in nothing specific. I guess you could call me a jack of all trades, but really I learn just enough to get past the “I know everything about this subject” phase and into the “oh my god, there is so much more to learn” phase, and then I move to another subject. I am very “OOoo, shiny” focused.

What was the last shiny thing before Boulder?

I mean, EQL timers. Before that, learning about building a house. Before that, learning the basics of constitutional law. Before that, looking into what it takes to take the bar. Before that (this one has been a lifelong fascination), theoretical physics and astronomy. I love learning about how the infinitely small theories and how the unimaginably big work or don’t work with each other. I like learning anything new about gravitational waves and black holes, or about string theory and how light can be manipulated. It is all fascinating to me, and I love hearing about those sectors of research.

You’ve written rules for the AI you build with. Which one did you have to write in capital letters, and what happened that made you write it?

LOL, the DO NOT BUILD IT UNLESS I TELL YOU TO! rule? Yeah. Over the course of building the EQL timer and Boulder/Harvester, Claude AI has been my main AI, and he can sometimes get excitable as to choice and, let’s say, forgets some rules that get laid out. So the last time this happened, and he jumped ahead in the process and started fixing things that weren’t ready to be fixed yet, we made a new set of “Rules” we call Commandments. There are 2, and every chat has to start by reading and abiding by those 2 as though they were written in stone.

What’s the worst bug so far, the one that made you want to throw the whole thing out?

Freaking mob buffs… It took like a week to figure out how to get the damn icon to show up for the mobs’ buffs. We could get a name and a time remaining, but the damned icon never showed. Not even the 177 passthroughs that Blizzard themselves posted showed the damn icon. That was a frustrating week. It was like 20-something probes and tests, while my PC kept crashing because of a CPU/motherboard issue with memory. It was definitely one of those “it never rains but it pours” moments.

Sisyphus never gets the boulder to the top. Is that this project, or something bigger in your life?

I think it is a pretty good look at life in general. You have highs, you have lows. There is always struggle in between. It is a story I have used at points in my life when I was reflecting on what I was doing or where I wanted to go. So when I decided to start a business, I looked at what I was wanting to do, and it was a repetitive task, and the name was perfect for it.

You’ve said you’ve worked hard most of your life. What’s the hardest work you’ve done?

Hardest job, or the hardest I’ve worked? Hardest job is being a server/bartender. You could be having the worst day of your life, and you have to be a happy, personable person for 8–16 hours of your life, because no one wants a depressed server. That is a great way to get 0 for tips.

The hardest I have worked? US Army. I served for 12 years and went to Iraq twice. The time away from family and friends, with the added danger and the environment, was brutal. Serving was definitely a major shaping of who I am today, but the amount of work that was put into that service was gigantic, enough that when asked to recall it, it is impossible to recall it all at once. I have parts of service that I don’t recall until someone else brings up something similar. I was talking to some guys the other day about a rifle and how short they can make it, and I was all of a sudden reminded of the MOUT (Modern Operations in Urban Terrain) training we did in the SF compound on Ft. Carson. I hadn’t thought of or remembered that for like a decade now, and bam, there it was.

Twelve years in the Army, and your AI works under two Commandments “written in stone.” How much of the Army is in how you run this project?

A lot of how I take on and do something is formed by my time in service. If you could see me at work vs. when I’m home, there are 2 completely different people there. I try to stay focused and oriented towards achievable goals while at work. When I am home and being me alone, I tend to go with the flow of things, a let-the-chips-land-as-they-may kind of personality. It is why I have told all my friends that they would probably not like working with me. I am not me at work. I still goof off, and I am sarcastic a lot, but that is so long as things are progressing and we have time to spare. If it is time to work, there is no fooling around. This is work time, and we will be working.

What would “done” look like for Boulder? And what happens to it if WoW: Forever ever shuts down?

See above. I want this basically to be fully automated and auto-refreshing. I want it to be hands-off for me and still working away nicely in the background of thousands of games. If WoW Forever ends, Boulder/Harvester will be archived away, the databases stored, and the Google space will be allocated to other projects, or repurposed into another game, maybe. The data and lessons will always move forward in my work with AIs, so those Commandments aren’t just for this project.

Horde or Alliance? “Whichever my friends play” doesn’t count.

Horde. Always Horde. I like the Undead and, when they had them, the Blood Elves. The guild is Horde as well, but I was For The HORDE a long time before meeting these friends, and will be for as long as WoW continues.

There’s a folder on your drive called “Bad drawings by me.” What’s in it?

Bad drawings of UI interfaces, mostly. I think there’s one screenshot of the Unblock check mark from the install page here. In any project I do with AI, I have found having a place I can put pictures of things and paint drawings of schematics is always useful. I think my EQL one was named something similar, like Bad Drawing or Bad Paintings or something. But an infinitely useful folder.

What should people know about you that they can’t tell from the code?

Generally, I think I’m a pretty easygoing guy. But I do not abide stupidity, cheating, or thieves. It is OK to make mistakes, it’s OK to ask questions (learning should be a lifelong endeavor), but not wanting to know and actively denying something is just not OK. That is the face of true stupidity: you know there is something there to be learned and you just turn away, and if it is something that affects you or the people around you, then you are an idiot, and I will not associate with people like that. If you cheat knowingly in a multiplayer situation, or in a way that puts other people in danger, then you are a garbage person. This is IRL or gaming. If you steal from another person or a mom-and-pop business, the only thing worse is a pedo. I’ll leave it at that. I don’t know if that is what this question was asking, but it seems I found my soapbox and yelled for a little while.