Playaholics
How much of a games website can you build with AI?
We rebuilt Playaholics, a daily games website, using AI through most of the build. People still decided what makes a game fun, and what’s fair to the players.
Live since 2 October 2026
What we built.
Playaholics has four daily games so far: Pot or Pop, Kwizi, Closed Circlet and Psychomaths. Everyone gets the same puzzle each day, with leaderboards for today, this week and all time. Players can start straight away as guests, or create an account to keep their scores and streaks.
Since launch we’ve added P-Nuts, a virtual currency with a shop to spend it in; daily reminders; the option to save the site to a phone’s home screen; and an Ideas page, where players suggest new games and improvements and vote for the ones they’d like to see.
Every score is worked out on our server from the moves the player made, so nobody can simply send in a high score. Each game is its own package, and a finished one can be added to the site in minutes without changing the site’s code.
AI and people
Who did what?
We wrote down what we wanted before we started building: the screens, the rules for scores and leaderboards, and the order to build things in.
What AI did well
- The routine code: forms, accounts, database tables and the checks that data is what it should be.
- Following the plan in steps, with each step checked before the next one began.
- Testing as it went, with automated tests it wrote and ran after every change.
- Kwizi’s questions: each week one AI model writes new ones and a second checks them for accuracy and fairness. More than 1,200 are live so far.
Where people made the difference
- Deciding what’s fun: playing the games over and over changed their design, down to a penalty for careless shots.
- The daily reminders were first set for 8am, until someone asked who plays games at 8am. They now go out at 10:30.
- Playing Pot or Pop on an Android phone, a person found a freeze at the end of a game that no automated test had caught; AI then tracked down the cause and fixed it the same day.
- Keeping it fair and safe: people decided what data we collect, how we treat players under 18 and when a score counts, and AI built to those decisions.
Custom software
What could you build this way?
Software that didn’t seem worth building a few years ago (an internal tool, a customer app or a game to teach your people something) may well be worth another look. Tell us what you have in mind, and we’ll talk it through with you.