I tried writing an interactive novel. I accidentally ended up building a platform.

A few months ago I tried to write an interactive fiction novel. I accidentally ended up building a platform instead. I started writing but as the story grew, I quickly realised two things: First, I’m not a great writer — and even less so when it comes to an interactive novel with all its complexity. Second, the further I got, the harder it became to manage the structure: branches, conditions, narrative state… everything started getting messy pretty quickly. The tools I tried didn’t really fit what I had in mind, so at some point I opened Visual Studio and tried to solve the problem myself. The idea was simple: I wanted to find a way to separate the prose from the logic that drives the story. That’s when the real experiment started. Since frontend isn’t really my main area, instead of trying to do everything myself I decided to try something different: building the project with AI agents (Codex) as development partners. What started as a small experiment quickly got out of hand. I got c