We build a beautiful game ourselves

1. One request before and after the skill

Alex had just been leading him by the hand — showing with examples how a skill changes the picture. That was masterful work. And now Tommy is assembling Snake from scratch and on his own — with Sam, from a gray workaday game to something cool. He already has everything in hand: a working Snake (it crawls, eats, the score moves — but it is gray and angular), an understanding of the three layers, and a ready-made design skill. All that is left is to go step by step.

Before celebrating, Tommy does what Alex told him to do: he sets a fair point of reference. First, he asks Sam for beauty without using skills — so there is something to compare it with later:

Make my Snake beautiful.

Sam makes it the way he knows how — changes a couple of colors, and that is it. Tommy opens index.html in the browser: grayish, wooden, just like in the morning. That is the “before” point. He even leaves the tab open so he will not forget where he started.

Now — the skill. Tommy drops the finished file into the project at .claude/skills/web-design/SKILL.md. The agent picks it up on the fly — all that is left is to check that the skill is in place:

/skills           # web-design is in the list — the skill is on the agent

The output of /skills includes web-design. The skill is in place — you can use it.

And that is when he finally has a choice that did not exist before. Before, he was happy when something merely worked. Now he can set a mood — with words, not code. He tries them out aloud, like clothes in a store: he can go neon — dark background, glowing lines, like a night city; he can go minimalist — clean, strict, expensive; he can go retro arcade — pixels, like in the eighties. The agent can handle any of the three, because the whole style now lives in the skill. Tommy settles on neon.

And then comes the sweetest part. Tommy repeats exactly the same request he gave at the very beginning, word for word:

Make my Snake beautiful.

His finger freezes over Enter. For a second, a little worm of doubt slips in: the prompt is exactly the same as the one that just produced gray mush. Why on earth would it come out differently now? The file is there, /skills lit up — what if it does not pick it up, and he gets the same dull squares again? Tommy even glances at the neighboring “before” tab, as if preparing an excuse for himself. And still he presses it.

Black screen. One beat of the heart — nothing. A second.

And Snake comes alive. It does not jerk across the cells like all his previous attempts — it flows across the screen, soft as mercury. The apple flashes when eaten, a sound clicks softly, and the neon palette glows in the dark like the night city from the morning rough sketch.

Tommy slowly takes his hand off the keyboard.

— Come on, — he says quietly into the void. — I did not even type a single extra word.

And that is true — he did not add a single word about “beautiful.” The prompt was exactly the same. The skill made the difference, because it sat between the two requests: the agent picked it up from the description field and pulled on the expensive style.

To believe his own eyes, he clicks over to the neighboring tab — the same gray, jerky one with the boring squares that he had deliberately left open. Back and forth: gray — neon, gray — neon. On the left, a school project; on the right, an app-store piece. The very same project. The very same request. And between them he placed a skill — and that was it.

— One file, — Tommy mutters, flipping between tabs. — I did not learn anything. I just dropped in a file — and it was not me who got smarter, it was it.

2. Checking that the logic did not break

Before boasting, Tommy does what he always does and checks whether the skill broke anything inside. He sits down and plays for real: the snake crawls, the apple gets eaten, the score rises — exactly as before. Not a single glitch in the rules. There it is, exactly as Alex explained: the skill only climbed into the appearance layer, into the CSS, and did not touch the logic — the JS — at all. The game works the same way; it just looks expensive now. And he does not take anybody's word for it — he sees it himself: “works” and “looks” really are different layers, and the skill fixed only the second one.

The gray toy became expensive, the logic stayed intact — which means this is the very polished thing, ready to show. Tommy adds it to his gallery the way he already knows how — today's piece is ready. Another win has been added to the shelf of victories: not just “works,” but “works and looks like a pro.”

The excitement is so strong he cannot sit still. Tommy throws a couple of screenshots into the shared office chat — not to the client, not to the outside world, but to his own people, where the fame is still small-circle and therefore especially sweet. He drops them in deliberately casually, in one line, as if offhand: “just messing around in the evenings here.” But he keeps glancing at the screen and waiting.

The chat lights up almost immediately.

Tommy rereads “you DID this yourself” — with the two question marks, with the capital letters — and he is practically bursting. He answers with a modest smiley:

Three words with more charm than truth. And exactly the kind of approval that feels especially warm when you are only just trying your strength and still do not fully believe in it yourself.

3. What he actually learned

Someone in the chat will not let it go:

“hey, where did you learn to make animation like that? this is not something you throw together on your lap”

Tommy savors the question for a second — he likes those. And he sends back exactly the way he likes it most: casually, as if it were nothing:

Well, I've picked up animation little by little. Sat down, figured it out, polished it up 😎

And he is not lying. Today he really did learn about layers, about skills, about where beauty hits — his head got to work. But in “picked up animation” there is a small substitution hidden away, and Tommy senses it from the corner of his eye. It sounded as if he sat down and learned to do this with his hands, the way one learns a trade. But he learned something else — how to put a ready-made skill onto the agent. That is a skill too, and a good one. Only the colleagues hear “he knows animation,” while the truth is “he knows how to give the agent someone who knows animation.”

Tommy notices that gap between the words — and immediately slams it shut: he does not want to admit it, even to himself. He does not rush to correct anyone; let them think he is cool at CSS. And in the office, his reputation is already spreading: the guy who makes bright things with AI, and makes them fast. Not clients yet, not money yet, not fame outside yet. But within these four walls, he is now the person people come up to with “hey, can you do this?”

4. The objection: but do you actually know how?

Oliver does not miss this fame either. From a couple of desks away he has long been listening to all this excitement out of one ear — and finally cannot take it anymore. He does not turn around, does not look away from the screen, only the fingers on his mechanical keyboard slip from a rapid staccato into a sharp single “click.” Next to his desk, an eternal cactus is drying out.

— Nice and flashy, no argument there, — he says dryly, at the monitor. — But if AI does everything for you, you will not actually learn anything, Artem. You will know how to press a button, and there will be nothing under the button.

“Artem” — not “Tommy.” By the full name, like a teacher in the hallway. His voice is steady, without venom, and that makes it land harder than if Oliver were just grumbling: he is not angry — he just seems to know in advance how this ends, and speaks like someone who has seen this before.

Tommy brushes it off without taking offense: Oliver has taken on the role of the skeptical nag among them and plays it honestly; he has seen plenty of people like that. Today's excitement is not going to be punctured by a trifle.

— Relax, Uncle Oliver, — he throws over his shoulder without turning around, with a light smile. — I press the button — and out comes a candy. What else do you need?

Oliver does not answer — only the keyboard starts clacking again, a little louder than before. But his line still hangs nearby — not as pain, but as a quiet scratch that Tommy is not ready to listen to right now.

In the evening, when the chat has died down, Tommy scrolls through his screenshots — and Oliver's words suddenly catch up with him in the silence, with no witnesses. I press the button, and there is nothing under the button. He brushed it off easily during the day, but now, alone with the screen, it scrapes at him. And half-joking, half-serious, he taps his phone and writes to Tom2036 — the way you write to your own person when you want to get snapped at and feel better: “hey, am I actually worth anything? or am I just pressing buttons while the smart stuff gets done for me? they applauded today, but I felt like I had nothing to do with it.”

Tommy rereads it twice. The skeleton of the phrase is intact, but the juiciest part — that word after “not emp” and the thing he “still does not know” — has been eaten away by black bars completely. No way to make it out, no matter how hard he squints. As usual: the older one seems to erase on purpose exactly the part he wrote it for. “You are not emp...” — and then a black strip. Comforting, they call it. Tommy snorts — not sure whether he feels better or worse — and puts the phone face down.

He does not feel guilty — and why would he? He did something: thought, set the task, chose neon. The day's high point does not break because of that. It is just that a strange aftertaste has mixed into the joy, a light tickle under the ribs that he cannot quite name and does not want to name. Tom2036, as always, did not spell it out — tossed out an image, erased half a word, and fell silent.

Tommy turns off the phone screen. A win is a win, after all, and no one can take that away from the day: the gray toy became expensive, the colleagues applauded, and tomorrow he will put something else on the agent. He sweeps the aftertaste of somebody else's medals into the same far corner as the rest of the unexplained stuff from the guy from the future. It can sit there — they will sort it out later, somehow.

He looks once more at the screenshot of the neon Snake. It is beautiful, after all. And he turns the screen off for good.