Game design, developer psychology, and technical deep-dives from the developer behind Devception.
Most collaboration tools assume everyone acts in good faith. Devception removes that assumption on purpose — and turns code review, communication, and trust into a skill you can feel yourself sharpening.
People detect lies at barely better than chance. So why do skilled players catch saboteurs so reliably? Because good detection is about evidence and pattern recognition — not gut feeling. Here is the science.
The real engineering story of a pre-launch multiplayer coding game: the naive textarea that fell apart, the operational-transform rabbit hole, and why we ended up on CRDTs with Yjs.
A practical guide to the architecture behind Devception: Socket.IO rooms and reconnection, why Vercel serverless fights long-lived sockets, CRDT vs OT for the shared editor, and server-authoritative anti-cheat.