DAVID
DER.

A software workshop. AI experiments, hobby apps, and notes from building them.

richmond, va

now building — dread index

7 apps · 2 essays · 2026

01 Dread Index Horror ratings on five axes — is it the kind of scary you actually want? LIVE2026 02 Chess Tempura The 2014 command-line chess, re-fried in TypeScript. All 685 WCC games inside. LIVE2026 03 Starfighter Deep space in one HTML file — planets, asteroid belts, throttle and boost. LIVE2026 04 Wake Up Neo Follow the white rabbit. A terminal in the Matrix, in your browser. LIVE2026
05 Desert Walk A top-down pixel-art desert to wander. Fixed-timestep simulation. LAB2026
06 Shandalar Web A love letter to the meta layer of Magic: The Gathering, 1997. LAB2026
07 Dynasty Local-first dynasty fantasy football analytics. Value over replacement. LAB2026

Writing

2026-09 · experiments

AI Agents: The Case for Scripts in the Skills Spec

Two experiments, $6.09 of API calls, and a recession the model missed.

2026-04 · field notes

I Pointed Karpathy's LLM Wiki at the D&D Rulebooks

~$50 and seven hours of unattended LLM time to learn that RAG is doing too much work for the wrong problems.

draft

One VM, many apps: the $25 platform

Subdomains, SQLite files, and a justfile — how every project here gets hosted.

Photos

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I'm David — by day I work in tech; by night I give odd ideas just enough software to find out if they're good ones. Some of these will graduate to real homes. Most will happily stay small.

david.der@gmail.com  ·  github.com/david-der

© 2026 david der · built by hand, with help