Blog
A devlog, built from the actual commit history: what shipped, why, and what search visibility looked like at the time. First person, no marketing voice, written by the one person who built this.
September 24, 2026
Anonymous Submissions and the Egress Scare
A viewer's idea for keeping bracket submitters anonymous, a Supabase bill that nearly maxed out the free tier in one bad day, and the best traffic day this site has ever had.
September 22, 2026
The Wheel Comes to Every Battle
The prompt wheel used to be a streamer thing. Now every battle can spin it, it can't be gamed, and your next room remembers how you like to play.
September 21, 2026
Fixing the Song Search Rate Limits
Two thirds of every API response the site served was a rate-limit error. Fixing it took three attempts, and only the last one was the right shape.
September 8, 2026
Rebuilding the Twitch Flow
45 people reached the submit page. 6 submitted. No match ever played. Nothing was broken server-side, which made it entirely my problem.
August 24, 2026
DaddyP Stress-Tests the Bracket
A live 16-song bracket tournament found real bugs no amount of solo testing would have, fixed within a day, and shaped a feature that shipped two days later.
August 17, 2026
The First Streamer to Try Aux Battles
A beta tester who actually played Aux Battles live on stream, twice, and became the reason bracket mode exists at all.
August 12, 2026
Moving to auxbattles.app
A permanent home for the project, and a look back at four months of building this thing in public.
August 9, 2026
SEO and Rating Polish
A roll-up of smaller fixes that don't each deserve their own post, three days that quietly moved the average up.
August 4, 2026
Dev Housekeeping
Internal docs, and a house style rule that got a full sweep of the codebase, including this post.
August 3, 2026
Bracket Tournaments and Friends Mode
The second flagship feature: 1v1 elimination brackets for big streams, plus letting real friends into a Twitch room while chat still judges.
August 2, 2026
By the Numbers
The homepage's stat tiles are pulled from real gameplay, not made up. Here's why that mattered.
August 1, 2026
In-Browser Spotify Playback and the Prompt Wheel
Spotify embeds, solved properly this time. Plus a spinning wheel that replaced the old prompt generator entirely.
July 28, 2026
Song List Pages and More Prompts
Curated song lists got real images, and the prompt library grew again. The week daily impressions broke 400 for the first time.
July 24, 2026
Polishing the Twitch Experience
Shipping the big feature is 20% of the work. The three days of fixes right after it are the other 80%.
July 24, 2026
An SEO Push
A short, dedicated audit sprint aimed at pages that weren't being found.
July 21, 2026
Aux Battles Goes Live on Twitch
The single biggest feature addition since the initial build: streamers running live battles with their chat as the crowd.
July 18, 2026
Adding SoundCloud
A second music source, and a volume-control fun fact that Spotify still hasn't fixed.
July 16, 2026
Cookies, Nav Cleanup, and Social Fixes
A consent banner, fixed link previews on YouTube and Facebook, and a header that finally stopped changing every week.
July 5, 2026
Shareable Results Images
The Final page gets an image you can actually post. Why that matters more for a game with no accounts than it would for one with them.
July 4, 2026
Rerolls, Prompt Cleanup, and Joining by Link
Letting hosts tune how many rerolls a prompt gets, killing the 4-letter code as the only way in, and the first What's New panel.
June 26, 2026
Teaching Search Engines About Aux Battles
A short batch of keyword and sitemap work, and the first real inflection point in how many people were finding the site.
May 29, 2026
The Neobrutalist Relaunch
The single biggest day in the whole commit history: the visual identity, the marketing pages, and going after search and AI crawlers before it was a trend.
April 12, 2026
Vote Locking, Mobile Fixes, and Not Voting for Yourself
Locking in a rating once it's submitted, blocking self-votes, and the first of many mobile-only bugs.
April 11, 2026
Custom Topics and the First SEO Pass
Cutting the round timer, letting players write their own prompts, and the first click Google ever sent.
April 10, 2026
Shipping the MVP
Spotify links resolving to tracks, a leaderboard, and a string of 'vercel fix?' commits. The first day, honestly told.
April 9, 2026
Why I Built Aux Battles
Years of manual aux battles, a notepad, and arguments nobody could settle. Here's why I finally built the app myself.
