Hobby Hero

Hobby Hero has had a few lives. The last one wrote hockey games. A language model played out each matchup about twenty times, and every run produced a full game sheet: period-by-period scoring, penalties, three stars and a story to go with it. It read like the real thing. It also cost like the real thing. Output tokens are never cached, and a box score, times the prose, times twenty runs, times every game on the schedule, adds up fast. The goal had drifted too, toward fantasy and betting. So I shut it down.

This version starts from the other end: math computes every number, and no language model gets a say in the result. Each side gets its own goal model, an approach from soccer that has been adapted for hockey. They read recent form: expected goals, the starting goalie, shot attempts and special teams. From there it works out a win chance and a spread of likely scores. Pick a date and two teams, pull the levers, and see what moves.

Every game of the last two seasons was predicted using only the games before it, and each one sits beside what the closing market said and what actually happened. The market still edges it out, narrowly. I’d rather show you an honest scoreboard than a flattering one. The closing line is a benchmark, but there are no plans to advertise gambling on the artifact.

It is also my first port to a Claude artifact, and it won’t be the last. Everything it needs is baked into the page, so there is no server to run and nothing to sign in to: you open the link and it works. I like that delivery mechanism so much that I’m building in artifacts from now on.