On Saturday I had a one-page idea for a game.

By Sunday it was live at keyboardwarriors.online with:

• real-time matchmaking and private rooms
• accounts, match history and a weekly leaderboard
• seven fighters, six arenas, music and sound effects, all generated by code: no art files, no audio files
• a pixel-art sprite editor, with an AI that checks every drawing before anyone else sees it
• a marketplace with its own currency
• an admin panel, an audit log, and a Discord announcer
• an anti-cheat that listens to the rhythm of your typing
• a logo

I wrote none of the code. I built it pair-programming with Claude Fable 5.1, Anthropic’s AI, in Claude Code. I made decisions, argued, playtested, pasted API keys, and lost a lot of typing duels.

I play a lot of Tetris 99.

I am decent at it. I am not “win the lobby” decent.

So I had a perfectly reasonable thought:

What if my computer played it for me, on the real Switch, pressing the real buttons?

Three days later I had:

• a robot that finishes in the top 10 against 98 real humans
• an Arduino that introduces itself to Nintendo hardware under a false name
• a Tetris coach that draws on top of my own live games
• three confident theories about why things were broken, all of them wrong
• soldered exactly three header pins, badly

This is the story, with drawings.

eTRIx: Roboteering

Restored and Annotated — 2026 Edition

A note about this edition

The original manual is preserved substantially as it was written in the late 2000s — voice, jokes, strange capitalization, iPods, movie references and all.

The annotations are new.

They come in four flavors:

2026 CORRECTION — something in the original is factually wrong.
2026 CAVEAT — the intuition is useful, but the literal explanation goes too far.
2026 UPDATE — the technology, history or context has changed.
2026 ASIDE — present-day Omar cannot resist interrupting younger Omar.