Wyrdli and AI

AI is a sore subject at a lot of tables. Some GMs love it, plenty HATE it, and most of the people I play with sit somewhere in between. Wherever you sit, you deserve a straight answer about where AI shows up in Wyrdli: how I used it to build the app, what it does inside the app, and how to run your campaign without it.

How Wyrdli was built

I'm Carlo. I've been writing software for 30 years, and I run games at my own table. Wyrdli is not vibe coded. Vibe coding is describing an app to an AI, taking whatever comes out and shipping it without knowing how it works. I wouldn't trust my own campaigns to that, let alone yours.

I designed Wyrdli and I drive its logic. The architecture, the data model, the rules that decide which clue points at which secret, the line the AI is never allowed to cross: that comes from me, and from 30 years of learning how software breaks. Wyrdli even runs on two open-source frameworks I wrote and maintain myself.

Some of the code was generated by AI, mostly the boring part: the forms, the plumbing that moves data between the database and the screen, the same pattern written for the twentieth time. I tell it exactly what to build and how, then I read and test what comes back before anything ships. It's a very fast pair of hands that never gets to make a decision (and gets corrected a lot).

Why use it at all? Because Wyrdli is built by one person. Without help on the boring part, the features you see would have taken years longer, and I would be typing instead of playing.

What AI does inside Wyrdli

Wyrdli does not run your game, and there is no button that writes your campaign for you. You make the world, the people, the secrets and the clues. Your players decide what their characters do.

With AI on (the Standard and Pro plans) it does the note-taking you never have time for. Record a session and it turns the transcript into a recap of what actually happened, picks out what your players loved or wished had gone differently, and suggests a few ideas for next session built from what the party left hanging. It can also answer questions about your own campaign.

Everything it produces is a draft you keep, rewrite or bin. It never writes a player character's actions, words or thoughts: that rule is in the code, and there is no setting to turn it off. Nothing is recorded until you start it, the audio is deleted 14 days later, and everything stays on servers in the EU.

Using Wyrdli without AI

The Essentials plan has no AI at all. You get the whole campaign manager: the canvas, scenes, NPCs, factions, secrets and clues, session scheduling with Discord confirmations, and dice on Discord. Nothing is recorded, nothing is summarised, and no AI model ever sees your campaign.

The heart of Wyrdli never needed AI anyway. It's built on prepping situations instead of plots: people who want things, secrets that are true whether or not anyone finds them, and clues that give the party more than one way in. That works the same with AI or without it.

If your players don't want AI anywhere near the table, you can tell them in one sentence: nothing is recorded and nothing writes our story. If you change your mind one day, switch plans. If you never do, you're not missing the core of the product.

What worries me about AI

I use AI every day and I still see plenty wrong with it. Here is what worries me too.

The models learned from the work of writers and artists who never agreed to it, and mostly never got paid for it. If that is where you draw your line, I understand.
It burns a lot of energy. That is one more reason Wyrdli only uses it where it saves you real work, and never just because it can.
It makes things up. A recap can describe, with total confidence, something that never happened at your table. That's why everything AI produces in Wyrdli lands as a draft for you to check.
It is flooding the hobby with adventures nobody wrote and art nobody drew. Wyrdli can suggest an idea when you ask, but it never fills your campaign on its own, and you can use it for years without asking once.

Where I stand

I'm not here to convert anyone. If you like what AI can do for your prep, Wyrdli puts it to work on the boring part. If you won't touch it, Wyrdli was built to work without it from day one. Both kinds of GM are welcome here.

And if you think I got something wrong on this page, tell me. The contact page reaches me directly.