Building a product with AI, without writing a line of code.

Genshin Impact has around 60 million active players managing genuinely complicated rosters — dozens of characters, thousands of equipment combinations, team-based play that rewards deep optimization. The community has built tools to help, but they fall short in a specific way.

Existing tools are either spreadsheets that require real expertise to interpret, or generic tier lists that don't know anything about what a specific player actually owns. Neither one answers the question a player is actually asking: given what I have, what should I do?

I'd been watching this problem for a while. It was exactly the kind of gap I look for — a real unmet need with a clear audience and a tractable solution. I decided to build the tool myself.

I designed Irminsul — a companion tool that connects to a player's account via the game's API, reads their actual roster, and generates conflict-free team recommendations with plain-language explanations of the reasoning behind them.

The whole product was built without me writing a single line of code. I directed an AI through every decision: architecture, data sourcing, interface design, logic, testing. The AI wrote the code. I made every call about what the product should do and why — what problems it was solving, what the experience should feel like, where it could go wrong for users.

This is the same way I work with engineering teams. I define the problem space, make product decisions, specify behavior, and push back when something doesn't serve the user. The difference here is that the engineer was an AI — which meant I could move faster, iterate in real time, and maintain full ownership of the direction.

I'm not a developer and I didn't pretend to become one. What I did was use AI as a capable partner — the same way I'd work with an engineer — to take a clearly defined problem from concept to working product.

This project demonstrates a few things at once: that I can identify a real problem in a complex domain, that I can take a product from nothing to launched, and that I can use AI as a genuine force multiplier without losing the thread of what the experience should actually do for a person.

If you want to understand how I think about AI as a tool in design and strategy work, this is the clearest demonstration I can offer.