Case study · NO. 02
Our bracket, not theirs.
Every bracket site wants an account, an email, and a data trail that ends at a sportsbook. I wanted my friends arguing about group C — so I built us our own.
- Started
- Spring 2026
- Status
- Scoring live results
- Share format
- One short URL
- Accounts
- None, on principle
No accounts, on principle
Bracket predictions are a fun argument between friends, and most sites price them at an email address and a summer of sportsbook ads. This one asks for nothing — which forces the interesting design: the share link is the bracket. A hundred-plus picks get squeezed, bit by literal bit, into a URL about two dozen characters long; send it to the chat and the other person’s browser reconstructs your entire tournament from the address alone. There’s no bracket database anywhere. The friend pool keys on a display name, because friends don’t need authentication — they need effortless.
Making real results score it
The bracket itself worked in days; scoring it against reality took the time. FIFA’s new 48-team format comes with full tiebreak ladders, head-to-head mini-tables, and an official constraint table that routes the eight best third-placed teams — regulations as load-bearing code. It’s exactly the kind of work I’d never have attempted solo before coding agents: Claude Code turned the tournament regulations into a rule engine I could test, which left me free to sweat the judgment calls — standings only publish once a group’s six matches all finish, so scores never flicker, and a hand-published admin result overrides any feed glitch.
The bracket reads you back
Filling out a bracket is taking a position, so the game ends by reading yours back to you: how chalky, how dramatic, how Eurocentric, and the gauntlet your champion has to run to prove you right. That recap is what people actually screenshot into the chat — the link carries the data, the card carries the argument. The knockouts are scoring live now. No leaderboard drama yet, but it’s coming.
