Who needs AI psychosis?! I gave myself VR psychosis 🤠
Modern life is an impossible luxury. You have a king’s ransom of salt and spices in your home, clumpy from neglect. These were once worth their weight in gold, and abundance has relegated them to the slithy toves of ALDI. It took centuries of globalisation to transform spice into an everyday commodity. In the early 2000s, I read a tabloid profile of a lottery winner: “I might buy my son a video game”. The journalist guffawed, “you know you could pay a company to build him his own game!” A hilarious extravagance. And yet in the last ~year, something you can just do, the price collapsing from $millions down to $20/month. AI Psychosis has never been so cheap. When you’re set up properly… you can do some pretty bonkers stuff. I’ve become obsessed with vibe coding VR games, auto deploying them to the web, and playtesting to iterate. In short, I want to share my descent into VR psychosis with you. 
Can’t read? Just want to play some VR games? I got you covered: With a game, you know within 10 seconds if you’re into it. A compelling story and overarching goal are great: rescue the princess. But even more critical is an engaging primary gameplay loop: jump on a lot of Goombas along the way. Iterative game generation is the fastest way I’ve found to hone taste. In a new world underpinned by agentic engineering, it’s the most defensible skill of all. Here’s what you might get out of this (somewhat meandering) life story:
Contents⚠️ Disclaimer ⚠️This is a bonus episode, with somewhat little to do with iOS. They say write what you know, and this was my all-consuming obsession for several weeks. If you are one of the dozen-or-so punters that unsubscribe whenever I publish an AI-adjacent post, we had something beautiful while it lasted. Fatherhood and InspoAllow me to jump back a few months in this deeply untethered narrative. My first brush with this came not from nascent VR psychosis, but from wanting to be a fun dad. A fun dad in tech. Many parents guiltily give their kids access to electronics when they need a breather. My daughter, between spats of dodgy YouTube slop, is partial to a balloon popping game. On a whim, I thought to myself: this is total dogsh*t. I could do much better than this. So I opened Claude and asked it to make a balloon popping iOS app with powerups. My fatherly vision of giving my daughter a flavour of this impossible dream: to become equal to a lottery winner, dictating the terms of a video game built before her eyes… might have missed the mark. Teamwork. User research. Bonding.
Did my daughter start playing the upgraded version of her own accord? No. Did she like it more than the (crap) original? Also no. But I got some super useful lessons about performing user research on a 5-year-old:
The Reluctant Web DeveloperLater that weekend, at a kid’s birthday party, while trying to desperately find testers to get in on the balloon action, I had a crushing realisation: I can’t iterate as fast while tied to iOS. Sitting in my home office, neglecting my kids, as I voice-prompt an agent to build a new power-up, is all well and good, but deeply limiting to iteration speed. Apple doesn’t exactly help themselves here either. The web, for all its faults, is (by a drastic margin) the easiest way to deploy things. Easier… after some annoying admin. My Automation PipelineIndulge me with another tangent, so I can set the scene. It’s relevant, I’m trying to explain the level of handsfreeness we’re playing with in 2026. It was May 12th. My birthday. You can send me gifts here btw. I was at the pub. A friend reminded me of a bit I used to do when I was 18 (which, for the record, I do not remember) which I employed in my eternal quest to be really annoying. When I’d make an edgy joke, I’d obnoxiously open an app called “Privilege Checker”™ to l a checklist (white, straight, cis, etc, etc), and, having checked my privilege, would deploy my moderately offensive joke. It’s all about the timing, you see? I chuckled at the alleged memory, and then, in my brooding, mysterious way, walked outside for a moment. I came back a few minutes later and shoved this web app in my friend’s face.
I can’t really take credit for this: I own no inference clusters, I have no complex pipeline, and I’m not personally touching Git on a Friday night. I just orchestrate moving parts that greater minds created. I’m just the glue. Specifically, the glue is my mouth. Voice PromptingTyping? Okay, grandad. Back to the nursing home with you. It’s crazy how much my workflow has changed since adopting voice-dictation tools. The vast majority of my day-to-day work is meanderingly mumbling into a microphone, and then code comes out the other side.
This is great for fast, messy iteration and field research. You emit a stream of consciousness and get something useful out the other side. Assuming there’s a model capable of interpreting your genius. This is rad for the one-shot approach. But also great for iteration. I get solid results with Wispr Flow and Granola. Wispr Flow is better for rapid live-testing loops where you’re tasting your own dog food and giving live shot-calling dictation. Granola is better for set-and-forget long-form user research. Claude Remote ControlThis works with Codex too, but I try to save my credits for important stuff. The /remote-control command, alongside caffeinate (to stop your machine falling asleep), become the poor man’s OpenClaw. You can prompt Claude in a folder on your machine from the app.
I say the poor man’s OpenClaw. It’s probably more like the poor man’s Mac Mini. I don’t quite feel dropping £799 is worth the luxury of not closing my clamshell. That said, once I got into the throes of VR psychosis, I got close.
Unshackled from my home office, I can dictate commands to my agent from the pub. Naturally, my agent has git access, able to push straight up to my repo and deploy. Git, Vercel, and CloudflareThe 3 amigos. Frankly, if you held a gun to my head, and told me to explain what Vercel does or you’ll blow my brains out, my last words would be a curse upon Vercel. I kinda reckon it hosts web servers, but don’t take my word for it. With some slightly annoying admin, you can make it so every git push automatically goes through to Vercel and gets deployed. So… I guess it’s a CI service?
Cloudflare is a DDoS protection service, which for some reason also does domain registration. I set up a CNAME for the subdomain games.jacobstechtavern.com that keeps my wildest ideas airgapped from my colleagues at Granola. This basically means for my jacobstechtavern.com domain, I can easily create subdomains, and Vercel routes the deployed web pages there.
Vercel and Cloudflare work together in ways I simply cannot comprehend, but they steam a good ham. The point is that, now, the cost of deploying is zero. The cost of implementing is also zero. The cost of putting my thoughts into a computer is reduced to a moment of mumbling. Thus blurs the line between ideas in your head and working software in your hand.
VR PsychosisNow I can explain the worst avoidable motion sickness I’ve ever given myself. This article comes out free next month. Read on to see the range of games I developed using this technique, including a worked example of the rapid iteration loop that has helped hone my sense of product taste. Paid members read it today, plus: ⚓️ Access my full library of 50+ paywalled articles Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
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