It’s my last day in Phuket and the end of my first five days on GridCollector. It’s been a real crash course in building with agents, and in what on earth a parallel is. It’s been so interesting and I haven’t been this energised in a long time, but I might also be ending this holiday more exhausted than when I started.
Properly putting agents to work on a build of my own was incredible. I had them researching and cross-checking the checklist for every set, which would have taken me weeks on my own. I maxed out my Claude allowance multiple times, which was probably a good thing, because it forced me to take a break and go for a dip in the pool. Then came turning all that research into one source of truth, with the agents organising what they found and flagging how much human review each set needed, and me working through the flags by hand.
Then there were the cards themselves, which turned out to be a whole world I did not understand at all. What is a parallel? What is an insert? What is a relic? Everyone seems to call the same things by different names, so even agreeing on what counts as a card took a while. Some sets have siblings, like Chrome with Chrome Sapphire and Chrome Logofractor, sharing some parallels but not others, while other sets stand completely on their own. I still haven’t watched a Formula 1 race (though I will soon!), but I’m now deep in the detail about how a Lewis Hamilton Gold Refractor is different from a Gold RayWave Refractor, which is different from a Gold Checker Flag Refractor, even though all three are gold and numbered to 50.
I’ve spent years on the other side of this, watching teams live with data models they wished they had designed differently, so it’s a strange feeling to be setting one up end to end myself, where the cards, the users and every feature all have to fit together.
The users were the other rabbit hole. Every collector I spoke to told me a different way they collect, so for a while it felt like there were infinite ways to collect. But you can’t just hand people infinite options and tell them to go wild, because that is just a terrible product. People need some structure and guidance, just flexible enough to fit what they are actually trying to do. After a lot of back and forth, I landed on three: collecting a set, a rainbow (every parallel of a card), or a driver, plus a fourth option to build whatever you want. It feels like the right balance, for now.
The rest of the app came out of the same conversations, and it’s really built around three kinds of collectors. The hardcore ones know exactly what they have and what they want, so they get collections and a proper view of all their cards. A lot of people also collect because it feels good to show off, so there’s a Showcase tab where you can pick your best cards and turn your physical binders into online ones. And newer collectors often don’t know what exists yet, so there’s Browse, where anyone can come in and see what’s out there.
Five days in, it already feels like we’re about halfway there, which seems wild for a holiday.