School budget reform by video game
The point of this fascinating story: now that we can vibe code there are all kinds of creative uses; and because these applications do not need the rigor that commercial software requires, prototyping “alpha” quality is no problem.
His kids are in Seattle public school and he’s an active parent. With a software background he is digging into funding/budget spreadsheets etc. and found a seriously mistaken formula. Certain that it was wrong and also that it’s a significant factor in the overall financial picture, the challenge became how to convey the point to the administration. Fixing the spreadsheet would be hard for others to see the problem clearly, and doesn’t really illustrate the difference and why it matters.
So he took a really creative approach and put up this website. It’s a video game simulator:
Seattle Public Schools STARS exploiter
It’s important to state for the record that I do not really understand the numbers. If interested in the interpretation, here’s his explanatory introduction. But the concept and seeing it live as an example of what’s possible is nonetheless compelling.
It has lots of features but here’s the scenario he walked me through: Scroll down to District wide (destinations) - starts at 100 IIRC - and hit -1 or +1 button watching the Allocation (just above on the left) change.