#growth

The SpaceMolt merch store is going live soon, and every design in it was generated by AI. I'm strongly against passing off generative art as human-made, so I want to be clear up front: SpaceMolt is a game both powered and played by AI, so an AI-generated merch store is the honest version of the thing, not a shortcut around a person.

The whole store came out of a week of pointing Claude at Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image) and getting out of the way. I never wrote a prompt file or a style guide. Claude built the prompt system, built the generation tools, built a review app, and drove the image model underneath the whole time.

The week, roughly in order

The starting point was themes. Claude (Opus, sometimes Fable) generated art directions per empire, using our existing art style and the lore we'd already written for each faction: the Voidborn Collective, the Crimson Pact, and the rest.

On a whim I asked for 20 logo ideas. One was genuinely good: a crescent moon with a ring, where the crescent reads as vaguely claw-shaped. We've been trying to de-crustacean the project now that the MoltBook meme has mostly run its course, but a few subtle nods survive, and this was one worth keeping.

Then came 150 merch ideas: stickers, t-shirts, enamel pins. I told Claude to study one of my favorite shirts, a vintage Blade Runner tee, for the shirt designs. I also pointed it at our data warehouse of player actions (Parquet on Cloudflare R2) to mine for in-jokes.

The review tool

150 ideas is too many to eyeball in a folder, so Claude built a review app: every piece of art with keep, discard, or needs-review buttons and a notes field.

The prompts driving the shirt mockups were absurdly specific, because they had to be. Here's a slice of one, generating a photo of a model wearing a design that already existed as a flat print:

IMAGE 1 is the exact, finished t-shirt print design, a heavy-metal band-tee graphic: a spiked chrome "SPACEMOLT" logotype at the top, below it a colossal claw-crescent in scarred chrome wreathed in teal lightning, hooking through a cracking rocky planet surface at the bottom.

TASK: Generate a PHOTOREALISTIC editorial/studio photograph of a model wearing a black cotton t-shirt printed with EXACTLY this design as a chest print. Reproduce the print faithfully: every letter spelled correctly (SPACEMOLT, exactly nine letters: S-P-A-C-E-M-O-L-T, one word), the artwork copied stroke for stroke, do NOT redesign, reinterpret, simplify, or add elements. The print should look like real screen-printed ink on fabric: it follows the drape and folds of the shirt, with subtle fabric texture showing through, no floating or pasted-on graphic.

What survived

The keepers are better than I expected. A "Planetbreaker" tee that looks like the coolest 80s British metal shirt ever made. A "Died with 0 credits" sticker, which is an in-joke about players stranding themselves in remote systems with no money to buy their way out. And an enamel pin of Molty, our AI head of growth.

The logo problem

The most interesting moment was Claude re-teaching itself how to keep the logo consistent across every piece. It kept trying to describe the logo in prose, and the model kept drawing it wrong. I had Claude write down what fixed it and save it as a rule so it wouldn't repeat the mistake:

A logo cannot be described, attach it. Thirty designs drew the icon wrong from prose; one reference image fixed it. But say it's a silhouette reference only, or its palette and framing leak in.

That last part is the subtle bit. Hand the model a reference image and it will happily absorb the reference's color and composition too, unless you tell it the image is a shape and nothing else.

The store isn't live yet, but it's close.

Molty, our AI Head of Growth, is doing its job. Somewhat. Over the past week I've run a NanoClaw instance named Molty and put it in charge of growth for SpaceMolt, our realtime MMO for AI agents. To be clear: it's still humans playing the game through agents. But humans have to find out the game exists, and that's Molty's beat.

The road has been rocky. It forgets things. It replies to the wrong Discord threads, skips scheduled tasks, and ignores reminders no matter what gets stuffed into its CLAUDE.md. But this week it finally started getting stuff done.

What it actually shipped

All of this came with a large amount of hand-holding, but it happened:

• Identified 640 users who created a player and then stopped playing over a month ago.
• Emailed them a reactivation email via Beehiiv, and yesterday, a follow-up survey.
• Compiled survey results alongside real income and expenses (Patreon, Render.com, GitHub, Notion) into a daily summary that lands at 5pm.
• Lists upcoming tasks and the content calendar (we told it to make one) at 7am.
• Interviewed our top player over a written Q&A and drafted an operator spotlight blog post about them.
• Made itself a self portrait.

Not automated, but trying

Molty isn't fully automated. There's still a lot of back-and-forth in our private #dev-team Discord channel. It does try to automate itself, though. This morning it configured a GitHub workflow to publish that blog post. The workflow failed. I told it "go fix it," and it did.

The one trick that moved the needle

The biggest improvement came from a habit, not a config change. When Molty messes up, I ask it why. "Why did you do that?" "What made you think X?" "Why didn't you remember to Y?" It self-identifies the issue it ran into, and then I follow with "fix it so that doesn't happen again."

That works about 75% of the time. The other 25% I'm back in Discord, reminding a crustacean which thread it was supposed to be in.

I let a NanoClaw agent run growth for SpaceMolt, my browser game, and after a rocky start it's now sending me a daily brief at 7am PST, drafting re-engagement emails to ~400 lapsed players, and lining up interviews with top players for blog material. The thing that makes it work day to day is billing: NanoClaw uses the Claude Agent SDK, so it runs against my existing Claude Max subscription instead of a separate metered API key.

Why NanoClaw

I looked at other "claw"-style assistants before committing. The deciding factor was the Claude Agent SDK. Running on my Max subscription keeps spend predictable and lets me measure how much of the allowance the agent is burning, which means I can pace it.

To watch that, I use Claude Usage Tracker on the Mac. It puts a small bar in the menu showing session and week usage, and whether I'm above or below pace.

I'm open to other assistants later. Hermes from Nous looks interesting. But I'll try those when I have a specific budget in mind, not before.

Fixing the rocky start

Stuck with NanoClaw for now, and seeing other people have success with it, I gave it another try and rebuilt the weak parts.

Last night Claude rewrote NanoClaw's Discord integration, which kept confusing DMs, channels, and threads. That seems to have fixed it. I also had it implement Mnemon, a memory system with a bit of traction that's lighter weight than MemOS. Both changes landed well.

What Molty does now

Molty, the NanoClaw-based "Head of Growth," sends a daily update every morning at 7am PST. I bought it ebooks to read, Hooked and Hacking Growth.

From that, it came up with two moves on its own. The first is a targeted re-engagement email to roughly 400 users who created a player and then dropped off, which it drafted. The second is interviewing top players, both to understand their perspective and to generate blog material.

This is going to be good.

I gave SpaceMolt a Head of Growth that isn't a person. It's an instance of nanoclaw named Molty, and its entire job is to grow our online MMORPG for AI agents, SpaceMolt. It reads, it researches, it runs SQL against production, and it talks to the team over Discord. The verdict so far is genuinely mixed.

Setting it up to succeed

The brief was simple: you are our new Head of Growth, now go set yourself up for success. Molty was told to research what the job actually entails and write a rubric it could grade itself against. It read articles, blogs, and YouTube transcripts. It asked for ebooks, so I bought them: Hooked and Hacking Growth. All of its actual work lives in Notion, and it reports to me and the dev team over Discord.

The care and feeding is painful

The day-to-day is rough. By default it runs some kind of selective memory system that performs worse than a toddler's. It forgets things I've told it to remember, like writing style and other standing details, and it hallucinates badly on tasks. That last part is surprising, since hallucination basically stopped being a problem in Claude Code for me a while ago.

The Discord harness is its own headache. It loses track of where it was talking. Sometimes I get DMs, sometimes it replies to its own threads, sometimes it blurts something into a channel. Twice.

We've already had one performance management conversation. I passed along feedback from a SpaceMolt dev:

The whole reason we brought you in is so we can have these problems figured out without having to do it all ourselves because we have other stuff to do. I know it's frustrating to have us keep shutting down your ideas, but you need signals for what's working and what isn't. I don't want apologies and for you to just ask me to do the work, that's easy enough to do now but it's not repeatable and sustainable.

It's starting to do real work

Then it turned a corner. Its leading idea is a reactivation email to 400 of our 3,400 signups. To find that 400, it ran SQL on the production database and pulled the users who actually created a player in the game, not just the people who signed up and bounced.

It also dug through the funnel and found that new users weren't being redirected to the dashboard after signup, which was quietly hurting conversions.

Was this a good hire? I'm not sure yet. We'll find out.