This week, Hack 5 project tested my patience more than any other so far. I started off completely stuck, I couldn’t land on a narrative that felt especially meaningful or worth building around. Every idea felt too vague or too forced. Even once I chose the general concept of encoding a message graphically, I got tangled up in the logistics.

I knew I didn’t want to generate the equations by hand again, like in my last project. So, I experimented with building a tool that could generate encrypted messages automatically. I started collaborating with Claude to help construct the software, but things quickly got messy. Letters wouldn’t render correctly, and even after rounds of corrective prompting and patching the code myself, I realized I was spending more time fixing problems than making progress. The broader concept—creating an encrypted message—wasn’t strong enough to justify all that manual labor. It had potential, but still lacked conviction behind any specific narative examples.

That turning point forced me to ask the harder question: if I want to express realistic dangers through encoding, what would a realistic situation be? Once I reframed the project around meaning first, I landed on the idea of a ‘tutor’-student relationship.

Even though I abandoned my initial tool, I was still able to repurpose part of the code to help me generate the base equations. From there, I applied linear transformations to tailor them to my story. Ultimately, everything worked out for my Beta Release.