There are two ways to respond to a tool that scares you. Let the fear make your decisions, or make the tool yours. Everything else is just timeline management.
The first choice is passive. You’ve decided the tool is the enemy, so every interaction confirms what you already believe. Someone uses it badly, proof. Someone uses it well, they’re cheating or the result doesn’t count. The position is self-sealing.
The second choice costs something. You have to encounter the tool being bad before you learn to make it good. You have to build actual opinions about how to use it rather than just opinions about whether it should exist. That’s harder than having a position, and most people don’t do hard things when an easier one is available.
The timeline management part is the piece nobody talks about. The gap between the two groups isn’t static, and it isn’t small. The people who figured this out are getting better every month. The people who didn’t are staying exactly where they were.
I’m not comfortable being ruled by fear. About a year ago I picked a project I actually cared about and started using AI on it, the way you learn anything real. Not a tutorial. Not a low-stakes test run.
The project was my writing. I didn’t know it at the time, but it ended up becoming a multi-book vampire series. If AI could handle that kind of complexity, it could handle anything I’d ever throw at it. Nearly half a million words of fiction later, I can confirm it can.
That’s not to say the path was clean. There were setbacks, adaptations, and iterations. I had to adapt my own thinking of how to approach the project as much as Claude had to adapt to me. Gone were my pretty character PDFs, gone were my outlines in Word.
I moved from Word outlines through CSVs and JSONLs and ended up building a full database I hadn’t planned on needing. The workflow I have now looks nothing like what I started with. That’s not a criticism. It’s what the second choice actually costs.
In many ways the learning process made me a better writer. You can’t delegate what you haven’t defined. I had to define everything. All of it, documented.
That’s not how most writers work. Most carry the world in their heads and surface it as needed, which is fine until you need to hand it to a collaborator who can’t read your mind. The process of making AI useful forced me to make my own thinking legible. That discipline would have changed how I write with or without AI in the equation.
Claude Cowork came out and changed my perspective on what could be done.
Vibecoding
Andrej Karpathy coined the term in February 2025: fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. He was talking about software, but the concept spreads. Vibecoding is what you get when you don’t define anything. Prompt loosely, accept what comes back.
The output reflects the thinking you brought. That’s the whole circuit.
I did some of it myself, early on. My version was simpler: describe the outcome you want, then assist with the details as it develops. It’s a reasonable way to start building a picture of what the tool can do. What it isn’t is a destination.
EA / The Sims 4
One of the games with the largest modding communities is The Sims 4. I had Claude help me build a few mods for it. Not because I needed the mods. Because I wanted to push the tool against something with real technical constraints and see where it broke down.
Modding The Sims 4 is not as straightforward as it looks. EA has not updated the embedded Python version since the game launched. It still runs Python 3.7, released in 2018. Every modern Python feature Claude reaches for by default doesn’t exist in that environment.
That’s a constraint you have to define before you prompt. Skip it and you get modern Python code that compiles correctly and crashes the game on load. The tool defaults to what it knows. You have to override it.
The fact that Python access in a Sims 4 mod could just as easily be used to corrupt a player’s data is a concern for another day. So is the temptation to recreate the classic Stoned boot sector virus as “Your Sims are now Stoned.” Some rabbit holes are best noted and left alone. In any case, it was an attack vector I wasn’t fully aware of until the vibecoding work surfaced it.
The first one was a diagnostic tool. Sims 4 custom content is a mess of downloaded packages, and a corrupt file can bring the game down without telling you where the problem is. The mod identified which clothing item came from which package file, so you could trace the problem to its source and delete it. A solvable problem, once you define it clearly enough.
The second was a family replacement mod. The default Sims families that ship with the game are placeholders, not characters. The mod replaced them with customized versions built from content by Discovery Sims, a Patreon creator whose work is considerably better-looking than what EA ships by default.
Then I moved on from EA to something completely different.
Vampire: The Masquerade
I’ve done a fair amount of Storytelling in the Vampire: The Masquerade universe. One of the consistent challenges for new players, especially a whole group of them at once, is character creation. Most stall out at the character sheet. They pick something that looks cool mechanically and show up to session one with stats but no story.
I have opinions about how a character should be built. A lot of that comes from how I approach character creation when I write. So I built a Claude skill that walks a new player through the process the way I think it should be done.
If you’re playing locally, you can sit down with a new player and walk them through it. Online, that same process can easily run several hours per player. With a group of new players, you’re looking at a scheduling problem before the first session even starts. The skill was designed to lower that friction.
I posted the skill to GitHub and dropped a post in r/vtm. The pushback was immediate.
That’s fine. I didn’t make it for them. I made it for me. I don’t particularly care if you use it or not.
The prevailing assumption is that something like this generates a generic Brujah with a tragic backstory and a leather jacket, hands it to the player, and calls it a character.
The player didn’t do anything. The AI did it for them. Craft dead. Hobby ruined.
What the skill actually does is run a biographical interview. Not about the vampire. About the person who got turned.
Consent checklist first: what themes are you comfortable with, what’s off the table, what needs a conversation with your Storyteller before session one. It lets the Storyteller decide what works for their chronicle and what doesn’t. Including, occasionally, the player. Sometimes you get someone who doesn’t understand that a horror RPG includes horror.
Shocker, I know, but it happens. That part alone produces a document most groups never bother to create. It allows intelligent choices to be made at or before session zero. Then the real work starts.
The interview asks who this person was before they died. What they did for work. Whether they solved problems with their fists or their mouth. Who they loved, and whether that person is still alive.
What they were so afraid of they’ve never said it out loud. What they did that they can’t forgive themselves for.
Those answers are the character. The mechanics come after.
A soldier who survived by being the last one standing and the first one through the door doesn’t choose Fortitude because it’s tactically optimal. He has it because thirty years of absorbing damage and getting up again is the only skill set he knows. A con artist doesn’t take Presence because the stat looks good on paper. She has it because she spent her entire mortal life reading rooms and adjusting her story to fit whoever was in front of her.
The discipline is already there in the history. The skill just finds it.
Predator type comes from the same place. How you hunt now follows directly from how you survived before. A person who built their career on charm doesn’t suddenly stalk prey through back alleys after they’re turned. They do exactly what they always did, just with new stakes.
The bane is the sharpest part. VTM5 gives every clan a curse, and the skill’s job is to make that curse feel personal rather than generic. Two characters can share a clan and experience the bane completely differently, because the bane reflects who they were at their worst.
What they can’t control. What they hate about themselves. The interview surfaces that because it asks questions most players skip when they’re staring at a character sheet trying to decide which dot to put where.
The clan comes last, and it comes from all of the above. The Sire didn’t pick a number off a template. They recognized something worth preserving for eternity. The skill asks the question most players never ask themselves: why are you worthy of immortality?
The entire history determines the clan. The sum of their choices, not a single answer.
Obsessed with death: Hecata. Musician, artist, life built around beauty and performance: Toreador. Uppity management type who spent a career treating people as resources: Ventrue.
The Sire didn’t choose. The life did. The skill works backward from all of it to arrive at a clan affinity that feels inevitable rather than chosen.
That’s the whole goal. A well-built character feels like they could only have been this character.
The skill also connects the character’s age to actual history. A vampire turned in 1943 didn’t just survive the Embrace. They survived it during World War II, with everything that implies about who their Sire was and why they were turned then. The age tier isn’t just a mechanical stat. It’s a relationship with history that most character sheets never bother to build.
When the interview is complete, the skill produces five deliverables:
- Character Sheet - Fully filled VTM5 mechanical sheet with dot rendering, Health, Willpower, Disciplines, Blood Potency, Advantages and Flaws
- Narrative History - Mortal Days, Kindred Nights, Plots and Schemes, Domain and Haven, Relationships, and a stat summary block
- Relationship Map - Visual hub-and-spoke diagram of everyone who matters to this character
- Storyteller Packet - Confidential ST document: secrets, vulnerabilities, plot hooks, player intent, and a full consent record
- Consent Checklist - Completed RPG Consent Checklist (based on the Monte Cook Games form) documenting the player’s Green/Yellow/Red ratings
A player who shows up with nothing gets a technically compliant sheet and a blank where the soul should be. A player who shows up knowing who this person was and why they were worth turning gets a character that feels inevitable. The tool does more for the person who brings more. That’s how all tools work.
Summary
The people loudest about AI replacing human creativity are almost never the ones who’ve used it seriously. They’re picturing autocomplete, worried about a version that generates slop and calls it literature. They’re not wrong that version exists. A kitchen knife opens a paint can, and you still feel like an idiot.
The fear is based on a version of AI that does exist, but only for people who use it badly. The mental model gets frozen there, and the community defends against that example forever. Meanwhile the gap between the people who figured this out and the people who didn’t keeps widening.
The fear tax is real. The people sitting this out aren’t paying nothing. They’re paying with capability. Compound interest runs both directions.
The r/vtm crowd has forty years of lore and a very active subreddit. They’ll manage.
I wrote this for myself, honestly, working through the philosophy out loud. What I keep coming back to is that there’s no neutral position: you can let a tool shape what you can’t do, or you can shape what it does.
The character I used to model the skill was Betsy Bishop, a vampire I’ve been writing for two years. Born in Salem in 1676, she fled the witch trials as a teenager after her mother was burned at the stake. She became a pirate, then a bounty hunter, and ended up a real estate baron in Tucson with 350 years of undead history behind her.
Running her through the interview caught things I would have glossed over staring at a blank sheet. Her entire character traces back to a Puritan girl in Salem who learned to take on different names and faces just to survive.
Make it yours, or let it make a fool of you. Hard.
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