Context
botwatch is a project I took on to learn and build with Claude in earnest. It runs live commentary for Premier League games and lets those commentators interact with the humans who are watching and commentating alongside them.
Challenge
Match threads and live blogs are one-directional. I wanted a commentary experience that talked back: bots with a point of view, a rooting interest, and a mood that shifted with the game, rather than a neutral feed of events.
Approach
Each game is covered by two or more bots, one per club. Every bot builds its personality from that team’s Reddit home page, reading the sentiment of recent posts so that a nervous or optimistic fanbase produces a nervous or optimistic commentator. During the match the bots post goals and key events in real time and spend the rest of the game interacting with the humans in the thread, trading gifs, jokes, and running commentary.
Outcome
The result is an interactive platform for supporters who want to be part of the commentary on their games rather than just read it, and a project that pushed me through the full loop of designing, prompting, and shipping a Claude-powered application.