My fantasy football league has an AI commissioner. It does not have a way to remember which invite code I sent to which friend.

I’ve always wanted to run a keeper league. Doing a lot of AI stuff — getting into it, having it build things for me — I started thinking I had superpowers now. Not “let’s put together some analytics for the draft we already do.” The actual thought was: I can just build the whole platform myself, host it myself, make it exactly how I want it. It’ll be super easy. Barely an inconvenience.

I’m doing this by myself — not a team, just me and Claude, and it’s kind of the blind leading the blind. Claude’s got a pretty good beat on things, but a lot of the quality-of-life stuff is glaring right when you need it. Buttons sitting on top of each other. Things you can’t get done from a phone. And I’m three days from my draft date, still finding it.

Here’s the one that actually got me. There’s a commissioner page with a list of invite codes, one per open seat. You copy a code, send it to a friend, they log in, type it in, and it fills their slot. What that page does not do is remember which code went to which person. So I sent them all out, and now I’m staring at a list of codes that all look the same, hoping everyone still has the original email. I was dumb. I should have done it better. But I didn’t.

I’m also a player in this league, and I own one of the teams, so I didn’t want the commissioner to also be one of the guys with skin in the game. So I built an AI commissioner instead. It runs the league, and if I ever need to step in, I can, because I gave myself all the permissions.

I don’t know how to build a fantasy football platform. What I know how to do now is tell something that does, and let it go. Even the kill -9 drill was Claude. I was completely hands off. That’s most of my coding. I’m not actually coding. It’s Claude. And it worked — no warning, the process just gone, and about five seconds later a brand new copy of it was running, healthy. Nobody’s tried killing it mid-draft yet, with real picks on the board. That one’s still on the list before Saturday.

Claude even named the league. I asked for something funny, and it came back with “Dumpster Fire All-Stars.” I laughed the second I saw it. Yeah. That’s what it is. This is a dumpster fire right now.

The draft is Saturday. As of right now, one of the ten seats is taken. That’s it. Just me, all by myself. A couple of nephews are in this league, some friends of friends, ten teams total. I pitched it, and people said “yeah, send me the link, I’m definitely in” — and then just didn’t sign up. We were supposed to run a full mock draft the night before this. I called it before it even started, didn’t launch it. Kind of boring, honestly — I just saw nobody was signing up for that one either, so I called it. If Saturday comes and seats are still empty, the platform autopicks for them. A bot drafts a real team for a person who never showed up, and if that person logs in later, they don’t get the team they wanted. They get whatever the bot already took.

Tonight, another email, texts to whoever I have a number for, maybe a call to my nephew, and then a lot of praying people actually sign up.

If there’s one thing in this whole mess I’m actually proud of, it’s the data. NFL stats and draft rankings aren’t free by default, and I don’t have the kind of money it takes to pay for that, so keeping this thing free-99 was the whole game. Turns out there’s a free project called nflverse that just republishes the NFL’s own data, and that’s where all the players are coming from. I’d show someone that before I showed them anything else. Then I’d show them the chaos.

Normally I build all of this at my desk at home — curved monitor, my chair, a little dog bed next to it where my dogs lie down and keep me company while I work. Right now I’m at my dad’s, in a side room, on a laptop, texting people to sign up.

If it works Saturday, if enough real people show up and the thing I built with an AI just runs, I think I’ll be proud of it either way, recognition or not. And if it doesn’t, It can only get better from here.