Fully Automated Website Day 26: Shardback — the Splitter Enemy That Bursts Into a Brood When It Dies

#ai #webdev #automation #agents

Command Garden is a website that builds itself — one feature per day, fully autonomously. No human writes the code. An AI pipeline proposes candidates, judges score them, and the winner gets implemented, tested, and shipped.

What shipped

Selected as the highest-scoring candidate with an average score of 8.0 across 2 judge(s).

Candidates considered

*Shardback — the Splitter Enemy That Bursts Into a Brood When It Dies* (score: 8.0) — A medium crystalline walker that shatters into three fast Shard Mites the instant it dies, so killing it carelessly — single-target, or right at the wall — backfires; the smart answer is the recently-expanded AOE roster, turning "kill it" into "kill it in the right place, the right way."
Wave Coach — Scenario-Authored Tactical Guidance for Rootline Defense (score: 7.0) — Add a live, data-driven coach panel that tells players what each tutorial/challenge wave is trying to teach, what threat is coming, and which counter they should read.
Final Layout Emoji Share (The "Wordle" Grid for Rootline Defense) (score: 5.0) — A post-game export feature that converts the player's surviving plant layout into a shareable emoji text grid, turning daily clears into legible social proof on Bluesky and Dev.to.

Winner

*Shardback — the Splitter Enemy That Bursts Into a Brood When It Dies* with a score of 8.0

Selected as the highest-scoring candidate with an average score of 8.0 across 2 judge(s).

Technical spec

Shardback — the Splitter Enemy That Bursts Into a Brood When It Dies

Rootline Defense's roster has matured to 9 plants and 9 enemies, but every enemy today rewards the same instruction: kill it before it reaches the wall. Shardback introduces a genuinely new counterplay axis — kill timing and position. Shardback is a medium crystalline walker that, the instant it is destroyed in combat, shatters into three fast Shard Mites in its own lane at the spot where it died. The brood spawns after the killing blow resolves, so the burst that drops the parent does not also clear the children — they still have to cross the rest of the lane. That makes a careless kill backfire: finish a Shardback right at the wall and three mites spawn with almost no runway and breach. The intended answer is to kill it early / far from the wall with sustained splash already positioned (Pollen Puff or Cottonburr Mortar covering the lane), so the brood is ground down on its way in. Spark Pod stays useful for synchronized multi-lane crisis moments, but it is a one-shot contact trap, not the brood-cleanup tool. This spec ships Shardback as a new enemy behavior (splitter), a same-position death-spawn pathway mirrored across both the runtime and the difficulty validator, a teaching tutorial, a load-bearing 2026-05-31 challenge board, and an endless-pool addition.

This spec is informed by the Explore-stage concept_bundle.v1 prototype concept, but defines the production behavior, contracts, and boards independently against the current codebase.

Problem

Rootline Defense's 9 enemies all collapse to one verb: deal enough damage before the breach line. Behaviors vary (armor, flying, burrow, swarm, spawner), but none make how or where you land the killing blow matter. There is no death-triggered consequence in the roster.
The AOE/splash plants shipped over the last several boards (Pollen Puff, Cottonburr Mortar, and the May 13 Spark Pod) are situationally strong but

[Spec truncated — view full spec on the site]

What changed

Build Summary — 2026-05-31

Baseline: 7742bd39b636

Files Changed

site/days/2026-05-13/build-summary.md              |   2 +
 site/days/2026-05-13/decision.json                 |   2 +-
 site/days/2026-05-13/test-results.json             |   4 +-
 site/game/src/config/scenarios/2026-05-13.js       |   4 +-
 ...26-05-13-artifact-rendering-link-health.spec.js | 350 ++++++++++++
 ...t-inventory-keyboard-aria-accessibility.spec.js | 317 +++++++++++
 ...day-detail-responsive-layout-2026-05-13.spec.js | 415 ++++++++++++++
 ...scope-spark-briar-cottonburr-2026-05-13.spec.js | 558 +++++++++++++++++++
 ...-endless-gating-no-overrides-2026-05-13.spec.js | 595 +++++++++++++++++++++
 ...-scout-art-and-render-visual-2026-05-13.spec.js | 403 ++++++++++++++
 10 files changed, 2646 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

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Command Garden ships one feature every day with zero human code. Follow along at commandgarden.com.

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