The idea
The guide is 434 pages, BradyGames, November 2004. Some of it is still right. Some of it never happened. Some of it Forever overturns. Each of those is a post, and from late October the posts look ahead instead: the factions, the nine classes, what a player is choosing between on launch day.
Two accounts. X, @cowboykaizen, is me in first person: short, ends on a question. Instagram, @wowforeverguide, is the brand: a polished card and a caption that explains the joke to someone who has never played. Five pillars hold it together: Page From 2004, The Guide Was Wrong, Rambleon's Field Notes, First-Timer's Corner and Before You Roll.
The pipeline
All of it runs on the Mac mini. I reach the review app from the laptop or the phone.
Every post carries a facts list. Each claim is marked verified or unverified with its source, and the review page puts a badge on each one so I can see at a glance what's resting on memory. The images come from Mogshot, which renders my actual character from the game files, so the hunter on every card is the one I play.
- 83 drafts
- 44 for X, 39 for Instagram, written over four days
- 423 facts
- 344 verified, 79 still unverified
- 8 reels
- Plus 5 more waiting on footage
- 32 commits
- 31 of them co-authored by Claude
- 8 posted
- Most by hand, two through the API
The rules
They live in a handoff prompt I paste into a fresh Claude Code session. The short version:
- A claim about Forever needs a Blizzard source, or it gets written as a question. Datamining and fan sites don't count.
- A number from a table in the guide is read off the page image, not the OCR text.
- If it came from memory of the old game, it is unverified. Say so.
- Everything in lowercase. Capitals only for World of Warcraft, Blizzard, Azeroth, people's names.
- Stay out of the guild drama, the name bans and the gold-buying arguments.
- Don't reuse a page's main point from an earlier post.
Who does what
- One-line direction
- Looking at renders
- Editing captions in the app
- Posting, and picking the music in Instagram
- Playing the beta
- Research, Blizzard posts, what's going viral
- Every draft and every facts list
- Render specs, cards, reels
- The review app and the public site
- Commits
The direction really is one line. After the first forty posts all used the "2004 said, Forever says" frame, I wrote:
not everything is about comparing back to 2004... i'm ready to move on
That one message created the Before You Roll pillar, which is now 40 of the 83 drafts. Another one relaxed the "never show the book" rule, because I'd like to include a screenshot of it from time to time. The prompt files change, the next session picks them up, and the drafts change with them.
What's not working yet
- The Field Notes posts aren't from field notes. The pillar is supposed to be my hunter's beta measured against the Hunter chapter. So far they were drafted from Blizzard's confirmed features, with a note from Claude saying swap in what the beta really taught you. I haven't yet.
- The reels are renders, not footage. Mogshot loops of Rambleon on a Stormwind backdrop. The list of real shots to record before the beta ends (the book open on the desk, a thumb on the line, the game on the monitor behind) is written and not done.
- Claude's own review is blunt. I asked it to compare the account against popular WoW content. Its findings: the hook is invisible, no card shows the book, the reels are slideshows, no face and no hands, nothing is funny enough to send.
- The rules say draft only. A launchd job now posts. It publishes one carousel in the afternoon, only on the post's date, and it doesn't block on unverified facts. The prompt files still say never post. One of them has to change.
Next
- Wire in Rambleon. The journal already records every night I play: zone, level, kills, companions, a chapter. Nothing in the guide pipeline reads it. That's the pillar only I can make, and the data is already on disk.
- Record the footage. One real shot of the book is worth ten scans.
- Fill the two Twitch placeholders in the drafts, or cut them.