Orakl

Before the pandemic I lived in Cluj and went, most weeks, to a quiz at an Irish-style pub. It was tremendous fun. Then the world shut, I moved back home, and the ritual ended. The local quizzes I tried afterwards were badly run, dull and faintly awkward. The obvious response was to host a few at home with friends. The less obvious one was to build the software to do it properly. Orakl is that software: a quiz platform on which a curator hosts a session and players join from their own phones, with questions, timers and scores reaching every screen in real time.

It calls itself the quiz platform for the curious mind. It is also my proving ground, the one project where every product decision and every consequence belong to the same person.

the shape of a quiz night

The core design decision is asymmetry. One person owns the session and its pacing. Everyone else plays. That split shaped everything after it. Players open a join link, pick a nickname and answer; nothing to install, nothing to sign up for. Curators get the controls: quiz configuration, timers, advancing rounds, a shareable code. A room full of people is playing within half a minute of hearing about the game.

Accounts have since arrived, but narrowly. A curator needs one to host, and a player needs one only to keep a record of games, solo or multiplayer. Playing a solo quiz for fun and joining a friend’s session still require nothing at all. The principle from the first version survived contact with the feature list: the account serves memory, not the door.

The server stays authoritative. Clients render state; they never own it. Real-time play over the open web is mostly a study in failure, since phones lock, wifi drops and tabs go to sleep, so most of the engineering lives in the unglamorous parts: reconnection and mid-game restoration, rate limiting on the join and answer endpoints, and a phase machine on the server from which every client view derives. Multiple question types, a solo mode, achievements and game history sit on top of that foundation and were, by comparison, the easy part.

gilding the lily

The interface changes with the hour. Dawn, morning, noon, sunset, dusk and night each have their own sky, and the site drifts between light and dark to match. Why does a quiz app need a sky? I have a weakness for unnecessary, good-looking things, and the transitions were worth every hour. A quiz is a social evening, not a form, and the room should feel like one.

rewritten from a phone

Orakl is unreleased, and things still break most nights. What has changed is who fixes them. The repository is thick with agents, skills, hooks and documentation written for an AI coding assistant, and the assistant does much of the maintenance: one agent removes dead code, one closes accessibility gaps, one catches documentation drift, one writes missing tests, one polices the tone of the copy. Each takes a single issue, makes a single change and opens a pull request that I review like anyone else’s work. I keep the scope narrow precisely so that the output stays reviewable.

The arrangement had its trial by fire on an extended city break in Athens, when I rewrote the entire application from Astro and Alpine.js to SvelteKit, from my phone, by directing the agents through the repository’s own workflows rather than typing the code myself. That the rewrite held is the strongest argument I can make for my AI-assisted process, and it is the same setup I bring to client projects that need AI in their workflow. Agents get the maintenance. I keep the judgement.

where it stands

Orakl runs at version 0.3.0, in regular use at the quiz nights that started it, and in active development since 2024. When it opens to the public, playing will stay free. Curation, the hosting side, will cost a small monthly sum to support the project, or a single lifetime price for anyone who would rather pay once and be done. I have no plan to sell the audience to anyone.

That last point is the one I keep returning to. Orakl is meant to be the clearest statement of what this studio stands for: security, a user experience that respects the room, design with some style to it, and privacy as a default rather than a setting. It is not finished, and that is the point. A product this size is a commitment to keep making decisions rather than a deliverable, and for the studio it does double duty: a game people actually play, and standing proof that design, engineering and an AI-assisted process can be one practice.