grand reified theory

from concept to concrete

This blog documents the journey of building software collaboratively with AI. Each post is a retrospective - a record of what we built, how we built it, and what we learned along the way.

The name comes from the idea of reification - making abstract concepts concrete. When you work with an AI, you’re constantly building up a shared vocabulary, a common language that grows more powerful over time. Like Guy Steele’s famous talk “Growing a Language,” the goal isn’t to start with a complete specification, but to build up from primitives.

Current Projects

ArtCraft - A Warcraft-style RTS built with Love2D. Most retrospectives here come from this project, covering performance optimization, spatial data structures, and workflow tooling.

Rotoscope Scenes - A character animation system with hand-drawn aesthetics. Features dynamic jump animations and a visual frame editor.

About Me

I’m Matthew Zinke, a software engineer interested in developer tooling, game development, and human-AI collaboration.


Views expressed here are my own.