Calendar Week 20 · 2026

I shipped the past couple of days of ProjectSpire work as Neow's Cafe v0.4.0, Catalog Service v0.4.0, and Parser Service v0.3.0. The old card-only parser and catalog names are now broader services, the parsers cover relics, potions, events, and monsters, and Neow's Cafe has live relic list and detail screens backed by the generated catalog instead of mock data. This is the first point where ProjectSpire feels less like a card browser and more like the start of a full Slay the Spire reference app.

I was pixel peeping ProjectSpire against the actual game, comparing the original Slay the Spire PNG in-game with my app's q85 WebP version generated from that same source art.

Somehow, despite the game having the full-resolution PNG available, the card looks worse in-game than it does in my app.

My educated guess is that the game has its own processing and rendering pipeline, with its own constraints and reasons for the final image quality tradeoff.

Still: huh. I am genuinely surprised by that.

I tagged a ProjectSpire snapshot for 2026-05-11, but this one feels different because I barely did any of the implementation myself.

My Codex usage is nearly gone, so Claude carried most of the work while I was busy elsewhere: parsers for relics, potions, events, and monsters; shared parser utilities; tests; and a few devlogs.

I haven't built the UIs I need to verify Claude's parser work against the actual game properly. So I don't have that confidence in its work yet without the validation.

I miss Codex and the clearer feedback loop, the back and forth, and...

Most importantly my own deeper understanding of how everything ties together.

Tomorrow. Today has been a long day.