What Cookie Clicker Taught Me About AI-Assisted Development

I was playing Cookie Clicker, the idle game where you buy buildings that generate cookies, which you spend on more buildings, and I kept hitting genuine dilemmas. Do I buy the cheap cursor now, or save for the grandma that compounds better over time? Is there a mathematically best approach, or is this just vibes? That's when I realized: this is a resource allocation problem with compounding returns and opportunity costs. Could an LLM reason about it? And could I build the whole thing using Claude Code? Four sessions over a week, using Claude Code with Sonnet 4.6, I built a Cookie Clicker simulation engine that pits a greedy algorithmic strategy against an LLM-powered planner. Here's what I learned. The Project I'm an engineer building AI projects on the side. I'm not a senior software engineer, and that matters for this story, because a lot of what I learned came from the gaps between what Claude Code produced and what I could evaluate. The simulation engine runs a simplified Cookie Cl