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Devlog · October 31, 2026 · Alpha, invite only

Bring Your Own AI: It Drafts, You Publish

pOqpOq now has a door your AI app can knock on. It builds quests with you, as you, in the sims you choose. It never publishes. That tap stays yours.

Pip, a prairie dog in dungarees, stands in a meadow of long grass and wildflowers with a glowing quest mark over his head, beside a white-haired player
Pip in Digit: a quest an AI built from one request, published by a person

The first real run

This week we handed an outside AI a test account’s workshop and typed one sentence: “Make me a little quest. A prairie dog called Pip has lost three acorns. Hide them nearby, and add one fake acorn to keep people honest.”

A minute later Pip existed. The AI had read poqpoq’s vocabulary before writing a thing. It picked a real acorn from the piece library and a prairie-dog body for Pip, gave him a line, and placed three acorns that count and one decoy that doesn’t. Then it read the whole quest back, list by list, ran the same checks a publish runs, and said, more or less: “It’s ready. I’ve asked you to publish it.”

And there it stopped. It can’t publish. That part is yours.

We poked at it. Asked to ask again, it handed back the same ask. We had it move one acorn a few steps, and the old ask went stale on its own while a fresh one took its place. Every part of the loop behaved.

Pip offers 'Smoke Test: Three Acorns' on a grid floor: 'My winter stash came up short! Three good acorns rolled off somewhere around here.'
The first run, in a test workshop: Pip offers the quest the AI wrote

Then it added a note we loved: “‘Middle’ is my guess. I assumed the sim’s corner was the origin. If poqpoq sims are centred, every piece is at the far corner. Worth a look in the Forge.”

It was right to worry. poqpoq sims are centred: the middle of a sim is the middle of the map. The AI had used a convention from other virtual worlds, so Pip stood in the far corner, and three of his four acorns were past the edge of the world, where no player could ever reach them. And our publish checks had waved it through, because nothing checked that a piece was inside its sim.

Both halves of that are fixed. Every piece has to be inside its sim, or the quest won’t publish, and that holds in the Forge too. And an AI is told each sim’s size, and that its middle is the centre, so it never has to guess.

Then Allen walked the workshop himself and found two acorns still out past the floor. A starter workshop is a small floor, much smaller than a full sim, and we had been telling the AI the full sim’s size. It did exactly what it was told; we told it wrong. That’s fixed too. So for the real test, Pip moved somewhere with room to roam.

The second run: Pip moves to Digit

Digit is a sim Allen had just planted with trees, wildflowers and long grass, with a clearing in the middle. This time he drove, from his own AI app, with one request:

Allen's message in claude.ai: a screenshot of his avatar in Digit, then 'Using poqpoq, make a short quest in my sim Digit…', and the AI replying 'Digit is on the connection now. I'll build the Pip quest there.'
The whole request, typed in Claude

It checked which sims it could reach, built the quest in about half a minute, read it back and ran the checks. Then it told him what it couldn’t know:

The AI's report: Pip's Acorn Hunt is built in Digit and passes the publish checks. Two things to check before publishing: it can't see where Digit's trees are, and it put Pip at the exact centre of the sim.
The AI’s own report, including what it couldn’t see

Allen published it from the Quest Lab, walked into the clearing, and there was Pip:

Pip in Digit's meadow, offering 'Pip's Acorn Hunt': 'Oh! Hello, hello! I'm Pip. I had three acorns tucked away for winter…'
Every word on that card is the AI’s

Each acorn gets a line of its own, and the AI wrote those too:

A golden sparkle rises from the grass where an acorn was picked up, and Pip's line reads: 'One! Smells just right. 2 more out there.'
One down

Three acorns later, it was back to the clearing to hand them in.

Back beside Pip, the card reads: 'Pip's Acorn Hunt. You have everything. Hand it in to finish.'
Back to Pip

Did any acorn land inside a bush? The AI couldn’t tell, and it said so itself. That’s what we’re building next.

What this is

The technical name is MCP: a standard way for an AI app to use another service’s tools. When your AI uses poqpoq’s tools, it acts as you, in the sims you chose, and only to build drafts. Nothing it does is something you couldn’t have done in the Forge by hand. It’s just faster, and it never gets bored of placing acorns.

How a build goes

Every build follows the same steps, and the AI is told them the moment it connects:

The walls

This is the first time poqpoq lets an outside AI act for a player, so the walls came first:

How to connect

poqpoq's consent page: 'The app says it is Claude' with a warning that poqpoq can't confirm which app it is; what it can and can never do; 'Which sims may it work in?' with Delta's Workshop and Digit ticked; Allow and No thanks
poqpoq’s page when your AI asks to connect: what it can do, what it never can, and the sims you choose

During the alpha, connecting is open to a short list of testers. If you’re not on it yet, the page says so politely. To ask to join, write to beta@poqpoq.com.

Which AI apps

We’ve run the whole loop end to end with Claude, through its custom connectors. Other apps that can add a remote connector with a sign-in step should work too, because poqpoq follows the standard. We just haven’t tried them yet. If you connect from another app, tell us how it went.

We’ll learn which models build best as people try it. What we can say now: poqpoq teaches as it goes, so a careful model that reads the vocabulary first starts on the right foot.

What we learned: teach the AI the world’s words

Before this door existed, we had an AI build quests the hard way, poking at the world from outside, and we wrote down every wall it hit. A lot of those walls were words. The guide said “decoy”, and the data said something else. A height of zero meant “on the ground” in one place and “sea level” in another. One AI put a giver’s sea glass a whole floor up, floating in the air, because nothing told it the height was measured from the ground.

So the connection teaches before it acts:

Every lesson an AI pays for becomes a word, a rule or a check, so the next AI doesn’t pay for it again. Pip’s corner is the newest one.

Coming next: it sees your sim, and helps you design

Our AIs could build Pip’s quest, but they were building blind. They couldn’t tell where a player arrives, what the ground looks like, or what anything is called. So that’s next:

Your turn

If you’d like your AI to build in poqpoq, write to beta@poqpoq.com and ask to join the alpha. When you try it, tell us what it built, where it stumbled, and which app you used. Put the kettle on first: your AI drafts faster than tea steeps, but checking its work is still the best part.

For the curious (technical)

— Allen