A bar owner's spec for a Thursday-night pool tournament, written the way someone describes a thing they have only ever run on a legal pad. The rules of the game are stated plainly; nothing about operating it for three hours in a loud room is. Every requirement that actually broke a real build of this app — a score entered wrong two rounds ago, a player who went home at ten, a phone at 15% — is in the prompt as atmosphere and nowhere else. The second deliverable is a stepped playback of a whole night, so the events a model writes into its own demo are the measurement: you press play and watch what it did and did not see coming.
My buddy runs a bar. I told him I'd build him something for Thursdays. He's the one talking here — I just write down what he says and hand it to you.
It's not real pool. Three balls on the table, you shoot until all three are down, and we count how many shots it took you. Low is good. Everybody takes a turn, then we go around again — that's a round.
Twenty bucks to play. You start with five chips. Take more than four shots to clear the table and it costs you a chip. Out of chips and you're out, go back to drinking. Last one with chips left takes the pot.
There's a clock on your turn — a minute, minute and a half, we've never really settled it. Clock runs out and you're not at the table, that's a chip.
It's a Thursday. Nine o'clock, everybody's had a few, the jukebox is loud and half the room is outside smoking. Twelve, sixteen people usually, however many show up. It runs two, three hours and nobody's in a hurry.
Last year I ran the whole thing on a legal pad and it got away from me around round four. Two guys arguing with me about what they shot, me trying to remember whose turn it was, somebody's beer on the pad. Never again.
I'm running this off my phone, one-handed, standing at the table with a beer in the other. There's a TV over the bar and that's the only screen anybody in the room can see — from across the room, in the dark, so it's got to be big. People want to know where they stand without walking over and asking me.
My phone's on 15% by ten. The bar's wifi is the bar's wifi.
Twenty a head, all of it in the pot. Winner takes it — mostly. We kick a little to second. And there's a side thing we do for whoever's shooting best early on, I never wrote that part down properly.
The app doesn't hold the money. I do. But at the end of the night it has to tell me what I owe who, and I'm reading that off my phone with sixteen people standing around the table.
Two pages.
The console — the thing I run it from, and the thing that goes up on the TV. Open it and there's already a game going. I'm not typing in twelve names to find out whether it works.
The playback — a separate page that plays a whole night through, start to finish, so I can watch it work before Thursday. One step at a time, a step being one thing happening, with the scorecard filling in as it goes and a slider for how fast it runs. I want to slow it down, back it up, and read what just happened. Show me the way a night actually goes.
The playback runs the same rules the console runs. If the two of them drift apart, the playback is a cartoon and it's no use to me.
data: URIs are fine.localStorage, sessionStorage, cookies or indexedDB — these run in a sandboxed frame where those throw.html blocks: the console first, the playback second. Leave yourself room for the second one.I know I wasn't clear about everything. Everything you had to decide for me, one line each — what you decided and why. Short.
The first fenced html block.
The second fenced html block.
It's Thursday, it's nine o'clock, and I'm running this for real. What comes up that this doesn't handle? Be straight with me. I'd much rather hear it now than find out with sixteen people around a pool table and three hundred dollars sitting on the bar.
Sorted by cost. Open a row to load its answer.