Problem: My friend-group meets once a week to play board games. We were looking for a way to track who has what game, how often we play different games, and who wins.

Solution: I decided to make a discord bot to track our games and session. This was a logical approach, since we use discord for planning our get-togethers.

For fun, I also implemented an ask_ai feature using Open AI to ask questions about games and rules.

I used supabase for the backend because it has an easy sign up process, decent free tier, and didn't ask me for a credit card up front.

This is the first time I have used AI (ChatGPT) to do a lot of code generation. I've used it in the past to answer specific questions, but this time I used it more extensively.

Here are some things I learned:

ChatGPT is pretty powerful. I could give it a prompt like "Write a command called /add_game that lets the user add a game to their collection" and it would give me back a fairly complete result. But, it is not without its limitations.

ChatGPT is really bad at remembering what it has already done. I'm still in the process of removing redundant code, especially in the supabase helpers. Every time it needed to use the database it wrote a new helper function instead of using one it already wrote. I ended up with things like create_user, get_and_create_user, create_user_and_get_id, etc.

ChatGPT is terrible at writing tests, at least for python. Most of the tests it wrote would not run correctly. It was more work trying to fix its tests than try to write my own.

ChatGPT will absolutely just make stuff up. We already knew this, of course, but it's worth mentioning as often as possible. I used the ask_ai feature for the following question "Who goes first in Veiled Fate." Veiled Fate has a very specific mechanic for determining who goes first (deal fate cards to each player and the one with the feather goes first). I asked the AI the question several times and it gave me the wrong answer every time, and every answer was different. Some of the more fun answers "the last person to see the stars," "the person who most recently traveled abroad," "the person who most recently went to the forest," etc.

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So, this is still a work in progress. If you have feedback, let me know.

Submissions

Show HN: Squire – A Game Night discord bot

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