After discovering that snake_case had been deeply baked into the project from near the start, I made the tough call to restart Stellar Throne from scratch. Enforcing camelCase from the new CLAUDE.md spec led to unintended breakages — especially thanks to batch Python scripts Claude had run, which mangled filenames and import paths.

Instead of trying to untangle it all, I opted for a clean slate. Painful, yes, but with the speed of agentic tools like Claude, I’m confident I’ll catch back up quickly.

On the bright side: the visuals are already looking better.

✅ What Got Done

• Rebuilt the star map with newly rendered star and planet sprites

• Implemented fleet movement, HUD overlays, and user notifications

• Built a new app: SpriteSheetMaker to stitch GPT-generated sprites into clean, aligned sprite sheets

• Recreated sprite sheets for F-type and G-type stars

• Began implementing ship construction UI and logic

💡 What I Learned

• Agentic development makes it easy to justify starting over — dangerously easy. Productivity makes code feel disposable, but discipline matters.

• GPT still struggles with sprite sheet consistency. The centering is unreliable, so I’m generating one-off sprites and stitching them myself.

• The starting sector often places the player too far from meaningful targets. I may need to guarantee at least 7 stars and 1 colonizable world within reachable range.

🧱 Still in Progress

• More star and planet sprite rendering

• Continued work on ship construction systems

Today I made major strides on the new in-game data editor for Stellar Throne. It now displays all JSON config files in a tree view with collapsible branches and supports basic text editing. This should make tuning gameplay values much faster and more accessible going forward.

Meanwhile, I continued working on the CLAUDE.md audit — though it’s turned into more of a rescue operation than a review.

A previous batch of Python-driven refactors (authored by Claude) introduced subtle bugs, most notably mangled import paths due to overzealous snake_case replacements. It looks like some *-based file rewrites accidentally touched filenames that were never meant to change, which has caused some issues across the codebase. Untangling this has required slow, careful manual review.

✅ What’s Working

• Tree-view editor UI for JSON game configs

• Collapsible branches, inline editing, working file display

• Good early traction on making tools for modding & tuning

⚠️ What’s Still In Progress

• Editor lacks save & backup functionality

• Needs scroll bar for long file lists

• CLAUDE.md audit continues to drag on

💡 Takeaway

Letting the AI run unchecked file operations (especially scripted Python refactors) can introduce subtle breakage. The lesson: don’t let your AI coworker manipulate your repo unsupervised, especially across filenames or imports.