01 // problem
Wanted a genuinely fresh trivia experience instead of a static question bank — but AI-generated content on a public game is only as good as its incentive structure. Nothing stops a player from replaying a board after learning the answers, or from just asserting a high score.
02 // approach
Claude (Opus 4.8) writes a full two-round Jeopardy!-style board every day — 60 clues via structured JSON output, real Daily Double placement rules, and a lenient AI judge for typed answers. The harder problem was integrity: the server is the source of truth for what's been played, not the client. Every judged clue is recorded per account in Firestore, so re-opening a clue after clearing local storage returns the original verdict instead of a fresh judgment; Daily Double wagers are clamped to a player's actual recorded score; and the final leaderboard score is computed server-side from those records rather than accepted from the client. Firebase Auth (Google or email) ties every submission to a real identity, with one leaderboard entry enforced per account per day.
03 // outcome
Deployed to its own subdomain on AWS Amplify with the same Next.js SSR + Firestore architecture as this site. Every board and leaderboard from day one stays playable and browsable in a full archive.
// stack