Can I be more productive with AI?

I own my way of doing things. With time, I got to believe in the power of patience for creative work. Ideas have to rest, somehow. Decisions must have taken at their own pace. Often, you take many micro-decisions in a couple of hours. Other times you need a week, or two, to get that “eureka” moment.

If you leave this part to anyone, or anything, you are missing the chance of connect things yourself. If you skip the writing of a huge, complete GDD with all your notes, you risk to get lost along the way.

You need to be a strategic thinker, and for that you need to have very clear the system.

“so, it’s a no?”

It’s a “it depends”. I started using Claude AI only on my personal project, the indie action sandbox Pawtners Case. I am developing it outsourcing Unreal Engine development, Art and first level design. And I am doing this in my way, I have no boss, no publisher, nobody supporting economically the project apart from me.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a project proposal that I still have to share with the team. Big docs are not meant to be shared with programmers and “hey, have a read”. Nobody will, it doesn’t matter if you’re a great entertainer or a poor writer. Still, they are very important for ourselves!

(with “big” I mean “more than 5 pages”)

Now that I got a couple of features and prototypes ready, I feel the need to share it. That is because now I see that they are involved. They need to know more. Before they were just following the lead of their client. Now they are part of this, for real.

So I asked Claude AI to review my document and find me possible areas that could need more detail. And I have to say that I am pretty happy with the result. The software is aware to be a software and it provided me a concise list of things. Many of them are not meant to be in a game proposal to me, so I discarded them. There are two of twenty points, though, that made me thing of small edits here and there.

I could have hired a freelancer to make the same work, but it’s hard to find the right person. I can clearly see the value here. Maybe those 2 points would have been reasons of discussions with the team. And that is valuable too.

I did the job first, and this software helped me with its editing. I am in control of the thing, I am not spinning a wheel and see what it spits out. I am the person in charge all the time. I see value in that.