Briefs

Briefs I gave to agents, and what happened

Real task descriptions from my own work, shortened and cleaned of private details. Each one ends with the honest result, including the parts that went wrong.

Salvor hero animation

Agents: Codex designed it; Claude tested and fixed it · 15 October 2026

The brief

Make an animation for the Salvor page: 100 agent sessions read one repository brain. Base every beat on how Salvor really works: entry files, the short state file read first, a learned failure that blocks a retry, a human yes/no before knowledge is saved, a reviewed pull request. Inline SVG and CSS only, calm loop, works in both themes, static under reduced motion.

What happened

Version 1 passed all of Codex's own checks, but in a real browser the 100 dots painted as giant colour blobs over the page. They were symbol references without a size.
Claude replaced them with plain shapes and redrew the wiring so no line crosses a label.
Version 2, by Codex again, split the sessions into Claude Code, Codex and Gemini CLI groups and moved the brain into a GitHub repo card. 12 of 12 browser checks passed.

What I learned

An agent that cannot open a browser cannot see a rendering bug. Every SVG gets a real screenshot before it ships; this is now a rule in the site's memory.

Sound for a 36-second video

Agents: Grok wrote specs, Codex synthesised, Claude measured · 15 October 2026

The brief

Make sound that matches the animation exactly. The event times come from the CSS keyframes. Exits and entries must be clearly audible and different. Then: an original background track, pleasant on phone speakers, no samples.

What happened

Round 1: timing was right, but leaving and arriving sounded too alike. Fixed with a different sound for each side, panned left and right.
Music: an electronic bed was irritating, a soft piano version did not convince, a chamber piece was muffled (almost nothing above 6 kHz), a bright own track had the wrong mood.
Film style finally had the right tone but felt incomplete. A three-way review turned that feeling into numbers: no energy above 1 kHz, no build-up, 2 of 11 moments audible. Version 2 fixed all three.

What I learned

Turn "something is missing" into measurements before asking for a fix. None of the models can hear; the ear stays human.

A city racing game in the browser

Agents: Grok gave ideas, Codex built, Claude tested · 15 October 2026

The brief

Raise the game to a clearly better level. Read the project's memory first. Use each real city photo once, as a distant horizon, never mirrored. Fix the frame-rate decay and the repeating error. Keep the engine sound and the save files.

What happened

First result: no more leak or error, but a flat navy sky, stray bars in every city, photos as small floating rectangles and 550,000 triangles.
Second round fixed it: every city recognisable, 77,000-88,000 triangles. The next phase made the photos worse again and was rolled back to the good version.
On a real graphics card the cities looked foggy at higher quality: a glow effect meant for night lights was blooming the day skies. It now runs only at night.

What I learned

Test at every quality level and on real hardware, not only in the cheapest mode. Keep the last good version so a regression is one step back.

More briefs will be added as I work. Using one of these? Tell me how it went.