Built with Shmorch

What this is

DarkBadge scores apps and games on five dimensions of addictive design, grounded in published research. Every score is generated by Claude from real App Store evidence — reviews, descriptions, and community posts. No rubric filled out by hand. No human guessing.

The stack

Design principles

An overarching goal of DarkBadge is to be genuinely usable: minimize brain overload from distraction, and make learning easy. Nothing changes instantly — no popup snapping open, no page cutting to the next. Real physical movement, smooth flow, fade in and out, all in visible contrast to the fast, addictive patterns DarkBadge exists to score. It reduces uncertainty, and it's one design philosophy, not a list of separate rules.

Every page starts simple: a score and one line. Depth is always one tap away, never forced on you first.

Color has meaning, not decoration. Each type of content gets one consistent color across the whole site, so a glance tells you what you're looking at.

Some of it came from saying no: no questionnaire (browsing real scores beats self-report), no single "primary" platform per app (iOS and Android score separately — collapsing them would quietly drop real signal).

How it was built

DarkBadge was orchestrated by Shmorch — the Shming Orchestrator (pronounced "Shmork"). Shmorch is a full software development lifecycle system built on Claude Code, also by SHMING. It runs a spec-first, BDD-driven process: no code before a failing test, no test before a written scenario, no scenario before a stated intent.

Underneath that process is a harder problem: keeping one coherent source of truth that a person and an AI can both actually use, given that each has different limits on context and attention. DarkBadge is proof the system works end to end — one of several ongoing projects chasing that same problem from different angles, and the one that's live.

The result is a codebase where every feature traces back to a decision, every decision to a requirement, and every requirement to a user need. Built in a 14-session proof sprint — roughly 56 hours of elapsed work time from blank repo to live product.

SHMING

SHMING is a design and engineering consultancy founded in 2000. DarkBadge serves two purposes at once: a real product for real users, and a complete demonstration of what this process can build. It's one proof of a repeatable template — the ability to go from zero to live product rapidly, in any niche where public evidence exists and a scoring rubric can be defined.