blog: The Confident Lie: What AI Got Wrong About @ViewBuilder

I’ve moved the SwiftUI card view forward by adding a real Card model, so even though the screen does not look dramatically different yet, the app is much closer to rendering cards from extracted data instead of hardcoded values. There is even a small visual regression in the golden text compared with the previous screenshot, but the important change is underneath: I can now refine the card parser and JSON output models, bring those records and required images directly into the app, and aim to emulate any card regardless of rarity, type, or data shape. The relevant work is in the ProjectSpire compare for the card view changes and the new card model.

I’m recreating the Slay the Spire 2 card view in SwiftUI with assets extracted from the game, and I’m very happy with how close the first pass feels. The current work is captured in ProjectSpire snapshot/2026-04-28, especially CardView.swift; most of it is still hardcoded, but the visual foundation is there. Next I want to generalize it so the view can take a card data object and dynamically reload the text, colors, and assets, which might eventually turn into a Slay the Spire wiki app for the phone.

I published Localization Formatters - Slay The Spire 2 Research Note, a ProjectSpire note on how card localization formatter functions such as diff() are resolved and applied. GPT-5.5 researched and wrote the note, and I am honestly amazed by how well and how quickly it produced a detailed explanation from decompiled sources in minutes. This is exactly the kind of agent-assisted research loop that makes ProjectSpire feel much more possible.

I’ve been working since last night and today with agents to document how Slay the Spire 2 works, prototype a Spire API and a REST API on top of it, and shape a WIP card parser that turns C# into JSON structures. That work is captured in ProjectSpire snapshot/2026-04-19, which gives me a concrete snapshot of the game model and tooling so far.

I’ve set up ProjectSpire Lab so I can run a script that pulls a decompiled copy of Slay the Spire 2 for local experimentation; the game code itself stays out of Git because I do not have a license to commit it. The setup lives in NicholasClooney/ProjectSpire. It gives me a clean foundation to build mod tooling from.

I’m recording the ProjectSpire ideas now even though they’ve been rattling around for a while: an unofficial SpireAPI for mods, a REST layer on top of it, and a voice-command/accessibility layer that could eventually add Whisper-backed recognition and text-to-speech. Writing them down gives me one place to grow the monorepo instead of leaving the ideas scattered in my head.