Scrimmage Bot

The community needed one thing answered every day: who is playing tonight, and at what position. Scrimmage Bot posts a button-vote game poll at noon Eastern, tallies it live in the channel and from DMs, tracks positions and starter-or-depth tiers, and sends reminder DMs at five and eight to anyone who hasn't voted. Players mark availability for the week from a DM grid; admins get a message when a slot has enough starters to schedule.

The copy had to work on Discord mobile, where selects collapse and half the interface is hidden — so every prompt points at the control it means.

There is no server. One Vercel function verifies Discord's Ed25519 signature and routes every interaction; Vercel Cron posts the poll and the reminders; data lives in its own schema on the Supabase project Life Platform already uses. No gateway, no worker, no PC left on — nothing to keep running.

The AI feature was cut on purpose. A planned /query command that answered questions through a local Claude worker would have needed a machine awake around the clock; the bot is better for being fully serverless.

Spec first, then a written v1 plan, then Claude executing under review — the same loop as the bigger projects, on a small enough product that the whole thing shipped in a day and v1.1 the next.

The lesson it taught was about the users, not the code: gamers on phones don't read, so the interface was reworked until it was obvious on a five-inch screen.