A small market question
One value moves.
One value stays put.
I am building a personal-use tool for comparing a player-market price with the fixed value offered by High Alchemy in Old School RuneScape.
Still being examined — useful before it is finished.
The question
What changes when the answer has two clocks?
The player market can move. The High Alchemy value is fixed. The useful interface is the space between those facts: a calm comparison that makes the variables visible without pretending to predict the market.
What belongs in view
Compare the variables, not a fantasy of certainty.
- Market value
- Moves with the player market
- Alchemy value
- Fixed High Alchemy value
- Costs
- The inputs that shape a possible return
- Volume
- How much activity may be behind a price
- Buying limits
- A constraint on how much can be acquired
- Potential return
- A comparison, not a promise
Product decisions
The tool should teach the comparison.
Keep the mechanism legible
Show the fixed-versus-moving relationship before asking someone to act.
Make limits part of the answer
Costs, volume, and buying limits belong beside potential return, not in a footnote.
Leave room for doubt
A comparison can be useful without becoming a financial terminal or a promise.
How it is being made
AI speeds up implementation. I own the judgment.
This is my personal-use experiment. AI can accelerate the implementation, but I own the problem, product and design decisions, evaluation, and responsibility for what this tool says. It may someday become open source; that is not a promise of this unfinished version.
Open questions
The useful parts are not settled yet.
- Which comparison helps a person decide what to inspect next?
- How much context is enough before the interface becomes noisy?
- What evidence would make a future open-source version worth sharing?