By Thorsten Meyer | October 13, 2026 | ThorstenMeyerAI.com
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It started as a one-minute film. Five days later it was a daily countdown, nineteen 3D games, a narrator in twelve languages and a public website. The interesting part is not how much an AI agent can build, but what was still left for me to do.
On Monday, September 28, 2026, I asked an AI coding agent for something small: a short animated film that counts down the working days of a German Altersteilzeit in the block model.
For readers outside Germany: Altersteilzeit is a form of partial retirement. In the block model, you first keep working as usual for a few years (the active phase) and are then released from work for just as long (the passive phase). A 4 : 4 model means four years of work, then four years off. Anyone in that situation counts the days. I wanted the counting to be fun.
By Friday, October 2, the result was Altersteilzeit, a free web app with:
- a daily view that shows how many working days are left, a saying of the day and the next milestones;
- a short film about your own two phases, with a narrator;
- a 3D game with nineteen ways to play, where every year of your active phase is a level;
- seven languages and five German dialects, a team countdown, a bridge-day finder, badges, and the legal pages a public website needs.
Every one of the 24 commits was co-authored by Claude Opus 5.5, working as a coding agent. I gave directions, made decisions and approved releases. This article is about what that collaboration actually looked like.
What the app does
You enter one date, the start of either your active or your passive phase, and pick your model, from 1 : 1 to 5 : 5. The app works out the other date and counts real working days: Monday to Friday, minus your federal state’s public holidays and the leave you enter.
From there, three experiences share the same data:
- The daily view is the morning glance: “Still up? 178 working days until you’re free”, a progress ring, a saying of the day and the next milestones. It can run as an always-on display on a tablet, export the milestones to your calendar, print a cross-off calendar, and find the bridge days that turn a few days of leave into the longest breaks.
- The film is a cinematic minute through your years: an office city at night in the first act, then sea, sky and sunrise in the second, where “Monday is just a word now”.
- The game turns every year of the active phase into a level, playable in fifteen modes. The years of freedom are played by the sea, as mini golf, boules, jetty fishing or a sailing regatta.
Privacy was a design rule from the first day. There are no accounts, no cookies and no tracking. Everything is calculated in the browser. If you share a link with your dates, they sit behind the “#” of the address, the part a browser never sends to a server.
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Five days, sixteen versions
Infographic 01 · From a one-minute film to a small studio’s output
Five days, sixteen versions
One person giving directions, one AI coding agent building and testing. Every day ended with something live that anyone could open in a browser.
Mon 28 Sep
4 commits2 games1 lang.
- v1A 51-second film of both phases, with a generated soundtrack
- v2–v3Leave, real working days, humour; anyone can enter their own dates
- v4–v5Two 3D game prototypes become one game: every year is a level
- v6Online on Netlify with landing page and seven legal pages
Tue 29 Sep
4 commits7 games7 lang.
- v7Seven languages everywhere, plus the daily view
- v8Office-chair kart: the third way to play
- v9Four more games, including mini golf for the passive phase
Wed 30 Sep
5 commits19 games7 lang.
- v10Badges and six everyday features
- v11–v12Seven more games, from paper plane to sailing regatta
- v12.1Hotfix: pages scroll on iPhone again
- v13Bridge-day finder, wish list, year review, four difficulty levels, five new games
Thu 1 Oct
6 commits19 games7 lang.
- v13.1“Time for AI”: the countdown recommends an Inside AI building
- v14A narrator in seven languages: film, saying of the day, game announcer
- v14.1–14.2One voice per role and mood; iOS audio fix
- v15Sound effects for film and games
Fri 2 Oct
5 commits19 games12 lang.
- Approval“All OK, roll it all out.”
- v16Five German dialects as full languages, voices included
- v16.1Announcement in twelve languages
Source: project repository and development log, 28 Sep – 2 Oct 2026; live site altersteilzeit.netlify.app.
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The pace is the first thing people ask about, so here it is plainly:
- Day 1 (Monday): the film, then leave and working days, then the ability to enter your own dates, then two 3D game prototypes that merged into one game with a level per year. By the evening the whole thing was online, with seven legal pages.
- Day 2: seven languages everywhere, the daily view, an office-chair kart race and four more games.
- Day 3: badges, twelve more games, a hotfix because pages no longer scrolled on an iPhone, then the bridge-day finder, a freedom wish list, a year in review and four difficulty levels.
- Day 4: a narrator in seven languages and sound effects.
- Day 5: my approval, and then five German dialects as full languages, voices included.
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Your calendar is the level
The rule that holds all nineteen games together is simple: time is the map. Every game maps real calendar units to gameplay.
In the maze, the columns are months and the cells are weeks. In the Calendar Stack, a full row is two working weeks, and a public holiday clears a row. In the Mail Flood, every email is a working day and every quarter ends with a boss. In The Last Night Shift, each night is a month, the clock runs from 10 pm to 6 am through its working days, and the boss only moves when you look away. Your leave shows up as a tailwind, an extra ball or fewer office ghosts.
One detail I like: the game names deliberately avoid other companies’ trademarks. It’s a “Calendar Stack”, not a well-known falling-block game, and a “Coffee Queue”, not a well-known snake.
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What the agent did, and what stayed with me
The working pattern was the same every time. I described what I wanted in a sentence or two, often in German and sometimes casually: “Let’s add Saxon … and two more that sound rather funny.” The agent wrote a short plan, built the feature, tested it, logged what it had done and why, and deployed. I looked, listened and decided.
What the agent handled:
- Engineering: single-file HTML pages that run offline, real-time 3D in the browser, about 18,000 lines of JavaScript and Python, and fifteen test scripts.
- Scale work: more than 1,800 text strings per language in twelve languages. For larger jobs it split the work across parallel sub-agents with a shared brief, for example five translators working at once, one per dialect, and then checked their output.
- Production: 1,224 voice clips (102 per language, three voices for narrator, sayings and announcer), 17 sound effects, screenshots for every language, and the deploy pipeline.
What stayed with me:
- The idea and the tone. The humour, the sea as the image for freedom, and the decision that the film should feel cinematic rather than like a progress bar.
- Choices that need a person. Which voice, which dialects, whether the narrator reads the captions, which contact address appears on the legal pages.
- Approval. On day five I listened to the sound effects and wrote: “All OK, roll it all out.” Nothing went out on the agent’s judgment alone where taste or reputation was involved.
Infographic 02 · Your calendar is the level
Nineteen games, one rule: time is the map
Every game turns real working days into gameplay: weekends, public holidays and your leave are counted day by day. The years off are played by the sea.
How each game counts down
■ Active phase, one level per year ■ Passive phase, by the sea
- Runa gate for every calendar week
- Office mazecolumns are months, cells are weeks
- Office-chair racetwelve month gates
- Calendar Stacka full row is two working weeks
- Mail Floodevery email a working day, a boss each quarter
- Clock-off Hopperevery lane a calendar week
- Paper Planeevery gap a calendar week
- Week Breakerevery brick a day
- Coffee Queueevery mug a calendar week
- Meeting Whacka 30-second round per month
- Stamp Beatevery working day a note
- Rubber Band Arenaevery working day an office ghost
- Office Extractionevery room a week, every page a day
- The Last Night Shiftevery night a month, 10 pm to 6 am
- Countdown Idleevery working day a task pile
- Mini golf12 holes = 12 months
- Beach boules12 ends
- Jetty fishingtwo casts a month
- Sailing regatta12 month buoys
The build in numbers
As of the 2 October release
How every release was checked
Nothing counted as done until it had been observed working
- 1Three screen widths. Phone, tablet and desktop (390, 834, 1440 px) for every page and language: no overflow, no broken images, no raw text keys.
- 2Voices transcribed back. A local speech-recognition model writes every clip down again and compares it with the script. It caught a stage direction being read aloud and a word spoken three times.
- 3Tests gate the deploy. If the site test does not pass, nothing is uploaded, and the test fails as soon as a hosting badge or iframe appears.
- 4Data stays in the browser. Personal dates travel only behind the # of a link and are never sent to a server. Voices are pre-recorded, so no names or numbers ever reach the speech service.
Source: project repository and development log, 28 Sep – 2 Oct 2026; live site altersteilzeit.netlify.app.
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Verification was the real work
If I had to name one reason this worked, it would be that nothing counted as done until it had been observed working.
- Every release was tested at three screen widths, phone, tablet and desktop, for every page and language: no horizontal overflow, no broken images, no raw text keys.
- Every voice clip was transcribed back. A local speech-recognition model wrote each clip down again and compared it with the script. This caught real errors. In one dialect run, an accent instruction written partly in German was simply read aloud, so a month name was followed by the words of the instruction. Another instruction made the voice repeat a single word three times. The fix was a rule: short accent directions, in English only, and only for lines of three words or more.
- Tests gate the deploy. If the site test fails, nothing is uploaded. When the hosting provider started injecting a badge that covered buttons on phones, the agent switched it off and added a test that fails if such a badge ever appears again.
Mistakes happened too, and the log records them honestly. A pages-won’t-scroll bug on the iPhone needed a hotfix. Two voice-generation runs once overlapped, and one dialect was generated twice, costing about 1,000 credits; since then, voice jobs only run one after another. A flaky test turned out to be the test server, not the site.
That is how I would want any team to work. The difference is that here the team was me and an agent.
Privacy by construction, even for the voices
The narrator could have been generated live in the browser. It isn’t. All clips are pre-recorded and shipped as files, for three reasons: no API key in the browser, no running cost per visit, and no personal data sent to the speech service.
That had a consequence for the script: the voice only speaks general sentences. Names, dates and numbers stay on screen. A personalised line such as “Clock-off, {name}. For {span}.” gets a general spoken version: “The transition. Clock-off.”
Time for AI
There is one more feature that connects this app to my day job. The daily view has a card called “Time for AI”. It links the four buildings of my free Inside AI experience, and the countdown is the curriculum: with more than a year to go, it recommends the Museum for the basics. In the last year it recommends the Engine Room, “while you still have colleagues to talk shop with”. In the final 70 days it’s the AI Tower, to see what your successors will work with. After the last working day it’s the Observatory, because now there is time for the big questions.
It is deliberately a gift, not an ad: no tracking, no unlock, and a single tick per building stored only in your browser.
What this says about AI and work
Five days for a film, nineteen games, twelve languages, a narrator and a website is not a normal amount of output for one person. A few years ago, this would have been a small studio’s project.
But I don’t think the lesson is “AI does everything now”. The lesson is about where the human work moves:
1. Direction beats specification. Short, clear requests worked better than long specs, as long as each result was looked at before the next request. 2. Verification is the job. The agent was fast because it tested relentlessly, and it was trustworthy because I could see what it tested. 3. Taste and approval don’t delegate. The tone, the voices and the decision to ship stayed with a person. 4. Logs make speed safe. Every version has an entry saying what was built, what was decided and why, and what is still open. That’s what lets you move fast without losing track.
What’s still open: native speakers should review the Hungarian, Slovak and Hindi texts and voices, and someone from each region should listen to the dialects. Some things a test can’t judge.
Try it
The app is free, needs no sign-up and runs entirely in your browser: altersteilzeit.netlify.app. If you or someone on your team is counting down a block-model partial retirement, enter one date and start with the daily view.
The numbers in the app are an estimate. Only the dates in your partial-retirement agreement are binding.
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