Week 52: Building a product management clicker game

I got inspired by neal.fun’s stimulation clicker game

If you haven’t seen it, neal.fun makes these simple browser games that are objectively rubbish but incredibly entertaining. I thought: what if I made something similar, but for Product Managers? A clicker game where you “ship features,” hire dysfunctional team members, and watch your burnout meter climb from white to orange to red.

The idea was build the game, launch it on my website, then use AI to do the PR and marketing push. A full experiment in using AI to create something and promote it.

I got halfway there.

The Process

I started building this about four months ago in Claude Artifacts. It seemed like the right tool—quick iteration, visual output, no setup required.

It wasn’t.

The game needed images (I wanted a photo of the patron saint of PM’s Lenny Rachitsky with a big thumbs up, see above).

Artifacts couldn’t handle it. Claude tried valiantly and produced this bizarre ASCII art version of Lenny that looked like he’d been through a fax machine. Twice.

So I moved to Claude Code, which had just come out. And then the real chaos began.

Over about 2-3 weeks of intermittent work, I exchanged 58 messages with Claude. Features got added. Features got lost during rebuilds. Syntax errors appeared, got fixed, reappeared. The team personality messages vanished and had to be recreated. At one point I had a working notification system; then I didn’t; then I did again.

Classic AI coding chaos.

But Claude Code is genuinely impressive—even for dummies like me. When things broke, it could usually figure out why. When I wanted to add something dumb (like a “Breaking News” ticker with headlines about gamifying privacy policies), it just… did it.

The game has four team members you can hire, each with their own personality:

Junior Devs who ask things like “Why is my console.log not showing in the database?”
AI Fanatics who announce “This meeting could’ve been a prompt” and “Plot twist: I’m actually three AIs in a trench coat”
Consultants who “identify 47 action items from that 5-minute standup”
PM Bots who have achieved consciousness and immediately started critiquing your roadmap

The breaking news ticker scrolls headlines like “ChatGPT applied for your job (and got shortlisted)”, “Marketing wants to ‘gamify the privacy policy’”, “User feedback: ‘This button should be 2px to the left’”, and “Designer quit after being asked to ‘make logo bigger’ 47 times.”

The Outcome

Is it fun? I don’t know. It’s silly. It’s more of a joke than a game. But it talks to the same struggles everyone in tech has—the meeting overload, the tool chaos (Slack, Jira, Asana, Figma, Notion all pinging at once), the consultant buzzwords, the junior dev disasters.

The game works. It’s playable. You can click “SHIP IT,” hire your dysfunctional team, watch your burnout meter climb, and enjoy the chaos.

What I didn’t get to was the AI PR experiment. That would have been experiment 53 or 54—using AI to actually market and promote the thing. Life got in the way, and the game sat untouched for four months before I finally decided to ship it as-is.

Sometimes “done” beats “perfect.”

Key Takeaway

If you want to build something visual or interactive with AI, skip Artifacts and go straight to Claude Code. I started with Artifacts because that’s what existed at the time, but Claude Code is significantly better for anything beyond simple text generation. It handles complexity, fixes its own mistakes, and doesn’t lose features during rebuilds (as often).

An added benefit, when you’re in the command line you feel like a hacker :)

Also: AI is surprisingly good at generating content that sounds like corporate dysfunction. The consultant messages and breaking news headlines are genuinely funny because Claude understands the absurdity of PM culture better than I expected.

Pro Tips

Go straight to Claude Code for anything interactive. Artifacts are fine for quick prototypes, but you’ll hit walls fast.
Expect iteration chaos. 58 messages and multiple rebuilds is normal. Features will vanish. Syntax will break. Keep going.
AI is surprisingly good at humor. Give it a vibe (“consultant buzzwords” or “self-aware robot”) and let it generate options. You’ll find gold.
Ship before you’re ready. I sat on this for 4 months waiting to do the “full” experiment. Should have launched earlier.

Want to Try It Yourself?

Claude Code for building interactive projects
neal.fun for inspiration on “simple but weirdly compelling”

[Link to playable demo - coming soon]