Requirements done. Interfaces roughed out. Not one line of Go written, which for me is a bit like standing in front of an open fridge with the door held wide, not eating anything.
Normally I'd have been three commits deep by then. I wasn't, and the reason is that this one was going to cost me a year of evenings, and I have a nasty habit of working that out afterwards.
Asking for the reasons not to
I get an idea. I get excited. There's something running by Sunday night. And then eighteen months later somebody in a thread says "oh, like such-and-such?" and yes. Exactly like such-and-such, which has existed since 2019 and has a logo and a pricing page. Twenty-odd years of that.
It has never once stopped me finishing something. What it does is change what the thing was for after the fact... it turns a product into a hobby. And Scout was meant to be different, because Scout is the first thing I've built that's supposed to actually make money.
So the itch mattered more than usual this time. It didn't feel like a new idea. It felt like the sort of idea four other people have had this year, and that means either the market is real or the market is a graveyard, and from the inside of your own enthusiasm those two look identical.
I should also say I'm not a hypothetical customer here. I'm the customer. I am a dreadful note-taker, always have been, and anyone who has played at my table has watched me squint at them and ask who the fellow with the ledger was again, three sessions after they met the fellow with the ledger (sorry, all of you). So what I actually do is record the session, run it through a transcriber, tip the lot into NotebookLM and then interview my own game about what happened in it.
It works, kinda... it works the way a wheelbarrow works. It will absolutely move the soil, and at no point are you going to mistake it for a digger.
So the question was never "does anybody want this". The question was whether somebody had already built the digger and I'd just never looked up.
Which is why, instead of opening an editor, I set an agent off digging. Not afterwards, not as a box-tick before launch, but running alongside while I carried on sketching interfaces, and with a deliberately unfriendly brief. Is this a valid product. Does anything even remotely similar already exist. Is it worth the investment at all. Is there anything here that stands head and shoulders above what people can already go and buy today.
I was, fairly explicitly, asking it to talk me out of it.
Two days later I had a report. Five hundred and fifty-four lines, and every single claim in it wearing a little tag saying where it came from: the vendor's own website, an independent source, or a bloke on Reddit. Which sounds like housekeeping.
What it said
Scout does not exist as a single product, and every component of it ships somewhere. That was the opening sentence.
Lovely. Cheers.
Three products converged on the same patch from three directions, and the maddening part was that not one of them had the lot. One sits in Discord and builds you a wiki out of your session while you're still playing it. One lives inside Foundry and does live rules work at the table. One does proper structured canon, with rules about which player is allowed to know what. Line them up against Scout and each of them had roughly two thirds of it.
So the position wasn't "nobody has built this". It was "everybody has built most of this, in bits, and nobody has bothered joining them up". Which is a perfectly respectable place to stand, and is a worse place than the one I thought I'd been standing in an hour earlier. You end up competing on integration rather than invention. Harder to sell... considerably less romantic.
There was real open ground, mind. Nothing commercial checks your campaign for contradictions, which is the one feature I wanted most and more or less why I started. Nobody answers a rules question conversationally mid-session either, and those italics are doing work: one of them enforces rules, meaning it stops you doing the illegal thing. Enforcing a rule and answering a question about one are not the same product, they're barely the same species. Nobody closes the prep-play-capture-prep loop. And all of them want you on their platform, so if your table is four people round an actual table with actual dice and a bowl of crisps going stale in the middle (which is most tables, and certainly mine), you are served by precisely nobody.
One bit I enjoyed far more than I ought to have: somebody had published my exact bodge as a how-to, back in 2024. Multi-track capture, transcribe each speaker separately, merge, hand it to NotebookLM, ask it cited questions. My wheelbarrow, written up as a recipe, by a total stranger. The report reads that as what happens when a product doesn't exist and people go and assemble one out of parts. I read it as somebody else out there pushing a wheelbarrow round their own garden.
The line that actually stuck, though, was "the largest risk is demand, not competition". There are two markets here. They differ by two orders of magnitude. And the enormous one... is people who want the AI to simply be the dungeon master. Scout refuses to do that, deliberately, in the requirements, in writing. I am building for the small segment entirely on purpose and I should probably stop acting surprised about the size of it.
Although.
In the same commit that added the market analysis, I also added a private auto-DM mode. On the grounds that if Scout ever does get good enough to run a game, I would quite like a go at being a player for once, rather than forever being the bloke behind the screen! It isn't shipping any time soon and it may well never ship at all. I mention it because a principled refusal is a good deal easier to admire when the person making it hasn't gone and built himself one round the back.
The bit that actually took discipline
You can shelve it and feel enormously sensible about having "Done The Research". Or you can read it, nod gravely, say "mm, very interesting", and then go and build exactly what you were always going to build. Both of those are comfortable, which is the whole trouble with them.
What I wrote at the time was that the findings were valuable and changed the approach somewhat but didn't stop us, that if the whole thing turned out not to be viable then at least my home games would be spectacular, and that the competitor to beat looked beatable, "perhaps blinkeredly".
I'm keeping the parenthetical. It's the most accurate word in the sentence.
And then there was the patent. Which I hadn't thought to go looking for, and which moved the design more than anything else in the document.
Wizards of the Coast have one pending. An AI gameplay assistant, priority filed August 2024, published this February. It claims a rules adjudicator grounded in the rulebook with a validation framework wrapped round it, watching for hallucination and accuracy and half a dozen other things besides. It's written Magic-first (which I found reassuring for all of about ten seconds), but the specification stretches out to cover other tabletop games where players have to adjudicate scenarios during play.
Which is, near enough word for word, the juiciest bit of open ground the same report had handed me about four pages earlier.
Nobody answers rules questions conversationally at the table. Turns out that isn't an oversight... it's a queue.
Now. I'm not a lawyer, a pending application is not a granted patent, and plenty of them go absolutely nowhere. But "the rights-holder has filed on this exact feature" is more than enough to make it a daft hill for one bloke with a day job to plant a flag on.
Read the other half of it, though, because that's the half I keep coming back to. What the filing does not cover: voice input, audio output, campaign state, narrative tracking. Say that list out loud. It is very nearly a description of Scout. So the design walked deliberately towards the ground the biggest name in the hobby hasn't claimed, and away from the feature I'd have told you a fortnight earlier was the obvious differentiator.
The other thing that moved the design comes from 2021 and isn't about AI at all.
AI Dungeon was the generative-fiction product of its moment. What finished it was a researcher walking out with a hundred and eighty-eight thousand private user stories, through auto-incrementing IDs, no rate limits, and nobody watching for anything peculiar. Then it emerged that human moderators had been reading unpublished private material. Trust went... and it never came back.
The report's line on it is the one I keep repeating to myself. What killed it was privacy, not AI scepticism.
And then the sentence that ought to keep me awake rather more than it does. Scout holds verbatim recordings of private social gatherings. Six people in somebody's front room, being entirely themselves, for four hours at a stretch. That is a significantly more sensitive pile of material than somebody's fan fiction, and I am proposing to collect it weekly.
So privacy stopped being a section near the back of the spec and became a constraint on the front of it.
The plan that came out the far side is smaller than the one that went in. Start local-only. Bring your own AI, so the running costs sit with whoever chose to run it. Lead with prep tools rather than live capture, because prep is the cheapest thing to build and the only part of this with no consent problem, no latency budget and no microphone in the room at all... which means it proves the entire canon idea without recording a single word.
And don't market it as AI.
That last one isn't cowardice, it's reading the room. The backlash in this hobby is organised and getting steeper, and the split is sharper than it looks from outside. Private, GM-side, prep-and-assist AI is by now more or less unremarkable. Public, player-facing, generated-content AI is poison. The rights-holder's own chief executive has described a home PC absolutely groaning with the stuff and, near enough in the same breath, said none of it is anywhere near their tabletop pipeline. Scout sits firmly on the private side of that line, and the way you survive over there is by being the thing that doesn't replace anybody.
A competitive analysis that hands you back a cost model instead of a feature list is not what I went in expecting. It's better.
Why I believed a word of it
There's a section near the end listing products that do not exist. Half a dozen names that surfaced in searches, got chased down, and turned out to be nothing whatsoever: a hobbyist repo, a dead domain, somebody's blog post about a thing they'd quite like to see built. They are written down specifically so that nobody, me very much included, burns another afternoon on them in four months' time. Recording a negative result is such an obvious thing to do that I'm slightly embarrassed I've never once seen it done.
There's a name-collision warning too, where two companies with nearly identical names had wildly different funding stories and the research came within a whisker of crediting one with the other's money. That single correction is worth more than most of the pages around it.
And then the bit that made me trust the whole document, which is a section correcting its own earlier claims. Three things this project had stated with confidence and got wrong, written out flat. My project. My claims. My confidence.
"No product maintains structured campaign canon" was simply false, and five of them do. "The live in-session wedge is open" was overstated.
The third one is the one that mattered. "The market pays sixty to a hundred pounds a year" comes out at five to nine pounds a month, which is roughly what most people in this hobby will pay, and I had taken it for the ceiling. It isn't the ceiling. It's the floor with ideas above its station. The product I'm chasing asks about twenty-four pounds a month for its unlimited tier, and a table that plays every week needs the unlimited tier, not the cheap one. Most of this hobby will pay nothing at all. The handful who pay properly are the entire business. Get that the wrong way round and it doesn't cost you a feature, it costs you the plan.
None of that had to be in there. A research document is perfectly entitled to hand you its conclusions and let you assume the working was sound. This one grades its own evidence instead, and this is where those little source tags start earning their keep. Reddit turned out to be unreachable altogether, so every scrap of community sentiment in the thing is second-hand and flagged as such. Nearly every adoption figure is self-reported by the vendor selling the product, and worth precisely what you'd expect. There's a list of what simply wasn't covered, and another headed "unverified" carrying some distinctly load-bearing items.
A confident competitive analysis is very nearly worthless, because you cannot tell "we checked and it's clear" apart from "we didn't look". The one that tells you where it's soft is the one you can actually plan against.
Five dollars and a Sunday night
After all that... five hundred and fifty-four sourced lines, four sweeps, a patent, a dead product from 2021, and a hobby that mostly won't pay for anything.
And the single highest-value action on the list was to go and spend five dollars.
One competitor claims live in-session rules assistance. The entire question of whether the biggest remaining gap is real hangs on a distinction nobody can settle from the outside, because enforcing a rule and answering a question about one are different products and only one of them is taken. Five hundred and fifty-four lines of desk research... and the answer was a month's subscription and an evening.
Measure twice, cut once, as they say. Nobody ever mentions that sometimes you want to stop measuring and go and poke the thing, and I don't come out of that comparison especially well.
The other validation was cheaper still, being free.
I had a game that night. Real game, real table, a group made up of seasoned DMs who all run campaigns of their own. So I took a summary of what Scout was meant to do and, somewhere between the ambush and a lengthy argument about rations, I read it out to them and watched their faces.
And the whole thing recorded itself. Naturally it did. They are all long since used to me having a bot sit in on our sessions, because I'm the dreadful note-taker, remember. So the litmus test for a product that transcribes tabletop games arrived as a transcript of the tabletop game where I pitched it. Their actual words, verbatim, unprompted, captured by very nearly the thing I was asking them about.
I'd love to tell you I planned that.
Three weeks later, it was wrong
I went back at the research in late August, and not for any of the reasons you would expect. I'd got a bee in my bonnet about a paper.
There's an academic write-up out of UPenn that describes what Scout does almost exactly, and I had got it into my head that it was cover. That Wizards had quietly funded the thing so somebody could hoover up copyrighted material into a training set with a university's name on the door. Proper tinfoil hat time, and I knew it while I was thinking it, but it wouldn't leave me alone, so I had the timeline pulled apart to see what shape it made.
Most of it fell over, which is what usually happens when you actually check. The patent does come nine months before the paper, so the bit of the hunch that said Wizards were at this early stood up perfectly well. But the names on the filing and the names on the paper have nothing to do with each other, and Avrae, which is the bot you'd obviously use if you were going to sneak this out through the front door, still has not one single AI feature in it.
And then the one that ought to have settled it. Hasbro spent June standing up an entire AI licensing arm for their other toy brands, and specifically carved D&D out of it. That is not what you do while building an AI dungeon master in the back room.
And then, right at the end of all that, the paper's lead author turns out to maintain Avrae. Which Wizards own.
He isn't at Wizards, he isn't on the patent, and he's also inside their ecosystem, looking after their Discord bot, while publishing the work that describes my product. I have read that sentence back a lot of times now.
It isn't proof and I'm not saying it is. It's not nothing either. I never got to the bottom of it and I don't think I can from out here, so it sits where that sort of thing sits, which is somewhere at the back of my head being no use to anyone.
What I had actually done, of course, was spend a fortnight looking very intently at the one outfit in this hobby that has shipped nothing at all, while four products that had shipped everything went by completely unnoticed.
Not one of them appears anywhere in those five hundred and fifty-four lines. One joins a voice channel on a slash command and sits there listening, then builds you a lore wiki that grows every session, keeps a relationship graph, writes narrative chronicles with the speakers named, links Discord accounts so it knows who's playing whom, and bins the audio when it's done. Five game systems, thirty languages, free tier. Put that list next to Scout's requirements and you'd have a job finding the join.
Then a second sweep corrected the first one, which is humbling in a way I'm still getting used to.
That product isn't the leader at all. It's six months old, two blokes, no funding, seventy-five servers, and the support Discord has forty-eight people in it. The one actually leading has something like three and a half thousand servers and is a single developer who publishes his transcription library, has written up what his transcription bill comes to, and documented a cost optimisation he tried and gave up on. Eleven products in the category once you count them properly, and a price everyone has drifted towards of eight to twelve dollars a month, which if you were paying attention earlier is comfortably above the ceiling I'd spent a page correcting myself down to.
Their about page is the bit I keep going back to. Two of them, using an AI notes tool at work, thought it'd be good for D&D, built it. That is my origin story with the names swapped out. I wrote mine into a requirements document and spent a fortnight interrogating it from every angle I could think of, and they shipped in February.
Everything to play for
Which all sounds like the point where I go quiet for a bit, and it isn't. I came out of that more determined than I went in, and it took me a while to work out why.
Go back to the first report and the line that stuck, the one about the largest risk being demand rather than competition. It was right and it was also no use to me whatsoever, because it couldn't put a number against the thing it was worried about. Is there a market. That's the whole question, it's the only one that ever mattered, and every sweep came back with a shrug and a paragraph about how hard the sizing is. You can't plan against a shrug. You can't even have a decent worry about it.
I've got numbers now. Eleven products, one on three and a half thousand servers, one on seventy-five, everyone landing at eight to twelve dollars a month. That's a small market, genuinely and measurably small, and it would be daft to dress it up as anything else.
But it's there. Somebody is paying for it. And the one thing I could never get at from the outside, the thing no amount of desk research was ever going to hand me, is now sat in front of me as eleven separate people who each looked at this and thought yes, that's worth building.
The other thing I'd been dreading got measured in the same round. I'd braced for players refusing to be recorded, and in every conflict anybody could find, every single one, the row was about not being asked. Nobody turned up refusing when the DM had asked first. The line this hobby draws isn't recording and it isn't AI, it's who gets to speak at the table, which is exactly where Scout's founding rules put themselves in the first session, months before any of this research existed.
I'd love to claim that as foresight. It's closer to a stopped clock, but I'll take it.
So: a real market, small, at a price everyone's agreed on, with a line I'm already the right side of, and a field where the biggest name in it is one bloke and a Discord server.
Nobody has won this. Nobody is anywhere near winning this.
Let the best DM win!
Originally published at phpboyscout.uk on 31 August 2026.
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