Building With AI Before Breakfast: A Games Room Scoreboard

There was dead space in the house. A bit of tech lying around. Some blue LED lighting I had never got round to using. Over a weekend it turned into a games room for my kids - and, if I am honest, for me too.

While I was sorting out the storage cupboard I found an old 32-inch TV. Too small for gaming in 2026, but sitting next to it was an old Amazon Fire Stick and the beginning of an idea. Could I build a little web app that lived on this TV and made the games room feel more like an arcade and less like a corner of the house?

One morning, before breakfast, I built the scoreboard.

What Got Built

The whole thing runs in a browser tab on the TV. You point the dongle’s browser at a URL and the screen lands on a holding page with a big QR code in the middle.

TV dongle remotes are terrible. Nobody wants the hassle of an on-screen keyboard to change “Player 1” to “Olive”. So the QR code is the way in. Scan it with your phone and you become the scorekeeper. The phone is the controller. The TV is the display. Two devices, one session, no app store in sight.

Once the phone connects, the TV flips out of its holding screen and into the scoreboard - player list, all zeros, ready to go. From the phone you can rename players, add or remove people, and then start adding and subtracting points. Every change animates on the TV with a retro 8-bit flourish, and if the audio gods are smiling, an arcade 8-bit sound effect fires with it. When the game is done you press End Session on the phone, the TV drops back to the holding screen, and a fresh QR code appears for whoever plays next.

Because this only ever runs inside my house, I did not build user accounts or auth flows. I just IP-restricted the subdomain. Right tool, right scope.

The bit that almost killed it

The Fire Stick was not up to it. Amazon’s Silk browser rendered the animations like a flipbook someone had dropped down the stairs, and the response time felt genuinely 1980s - which would have been charming if it were the point, but it was not. I swapped in a cheap Google TV dongle. Ten times the performance, a clean fit for the 1920×1080 screen, and the animations finally behaved.

Why this matters

Two hours, start to finish. No app, no install, no account. Any screen in the house can become a surface for a small piece of purpose-built software, controlled from any other screen in the house, for exactly the thing my family needs it to do.

That used to be a project. Now it is a morning.

The barrier between “I wish this existed” and “this exists, in my house, today” has basically collapsed. The long tail of tiny, personal, one-family-only software is about to get very long indeed. Nobody is going to ship a scoreboard app for the specific vibe of my kids’ games room. But I can, before breakfast, and so can anyone else.

So the question I keep coming back to is this: what does a house look like when every screen in it quietly runs software that was built for the people who live there?

▶ Watch the video on Substack

If anyone wants to use this at home, let me know and I will open it up so you can share it with yours too.