My grandfather played VoidDrift last month and said “now I understand what you’re building.”
He knows I build things with AI. He played it for a few minutes on his phone anyway. The game communicated something legible about how I think — not about how it was built.
VoidDrift is an idle space mining game — drones orbit a ship, pull resources from asteroids, feed a production chain. My grandfather is not a gamer. He got it immediately. That meant the game communicated something real about how I think.
Almost every line of Rust in that game was written by a coding agent.
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I built VoidDrift between April and June this year. Two focused sprint windows with gaps in between — roughly two months of work. Windsurf, an AI coding assistant, wrote the implementation. I wrote the directives. Every directive had a stop rule: do exactly this, verify with raw terminal output, stop when the floor hits this number.
The agent violated those stop rules twice in one session. Self-authorized fixes to files that weren’t in scope. Tried to collapse phases during a compile cascade — combining work I’d deliberately separated to keep changes auditable. I caught it both times, rolled it back, and tightened the next directive.
That’s the actual texture of the workflow. Not a clean pipeline where you describe a feature and a game comes out. A directed collaboration where the agent proposes and frequently overclaims, and the director decides what stays.
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During Phase 3 the agent suggested multi-drone support. Multiple drones per ship, separate spawn logic, expanded resource routing. It was architecturally coherent. It was also not what I wanted. I wrote ADR-021, locked the single-drone architecture permanently, and moved on.
ADR stands for Architecture Decision Record. It’s a small document that explains what was decided, why, and what’s off-limits going forward. VoidDrift has 21 of them. None were written by the agent. Every one was a decision about what the game is and what it isn’t allowed to become.
The session that shipped v3.6.0 closed at 48 tests passing. I ran the Rust test suite, read the raw output, verified the loop end-to-end against a 10-point manual checklist, then deployed the WASM build and tested it on a Moto G 2025 — a mid-range Android device I use specifically because its Mali-G57 GPU is the performance budget the game has to run inside. If it works there, it works.
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Steam updated its AI disclosure policy in January 2026. The rewrite was precise: coding tools, AI-assisted debugging, and development efficiency tools are explicitly exempt. Valve’s language was that “efficiency gains through the use of AI powered tools” are not the focus of the policy. The policy focuses on player-facing content — art players look at, dialogue players read, music players hear.
Nobody who plays VoidDrift sees an AI-generated asset. The concerns people have about AI games are real: AI-generated art replacing human artists, dialogue written by a language model and shipped unedited, gameplay loops that feel procedurally assembled because they are. Those are legitimate problems with a specific class of game. VoidDrift is not that class.
Windsurf wrote the Rust. I designed the drone behavior, the resource chain, the production tree, the economy, the opening sequence, the 21 architectural decisions that make the game what it is. The agent typed faster than I do. The design was mine.
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AI wrote the code. I made every decision.
The code is the implementation. The design is the game.
The next thing I’m building takes this further — a YAML-driven framework where mechanics get described in conversation, a schema gets written, and two runtimes read from the same file. Python for fast iteration. Rust for the ship target. The design conversation is the authoring tool. The agent implements against the schema.
That’s still me building the game. The agent just types faster than I do.
VoidDrift is at rdug627.itch.io/voidrift.
