Use of AI

The code in the bot, the add-on and this website was written with heavy use of Anthropic’s Claude, driven from Claude Code, over months of daily work alongside a human author who directed it, rejected a great deal of it, and is answerable for every line that shipped.

The assistant is a tool that writes quickly and understands nothing about whether a craft actually lands. So the part of the process that matters is not what wrote the first draft. It is what happened to that draft afterwards, which is the rest of this page.

Its use runs across the whole codebase rather than sitting in one corner of it. Calling it a “boilerplate helper” would be the easier thing to say, but it would not quite cover the work it did.

• Deciding what this is. The design aspects, the rules of the economy, what is fair between two players, what a rescue contract even means: those are the author’s, and most of the work was arguing the assistant out of the obvious wrong answer.
• Judging whether it works. A model cannot tell you that a transferred craft arrives buried in a hillside, that a thawed kerbal loses SAS, or that the Astronaut Complex has quietly stopped hiring. Every one of those was found by playing the game.
• Art and assets. The add-on ships no parts, no models and no textures. It is a plugin; it adds behaviour to the parts you already have.
• Other people’s work. Nothing here redistributes another mod. When a shared craft uses a texture pack, the paint job is carried as a reference and a dependency list, never the pack’s art. Missing mods are resolved into a CKAN modpack that installs them from their authors, with the right attribution and the right versions.

Generated code that nobody verified is worthless, and we treat it that way. Four things stand between a draft and a release:

Two rules run through all of it. A test scenario whose manual step was not actually performed reports skipped, never passed. Reporting green for work nobody did is the exact failure this process exists to prevent. And the test harness calls the real functions rather than its own copy of them, because a harness that reimplements the logic it is checking passes precisely when the real code fails.

The debug bridge that makes all of this possible is compiled out of the released add-on, and the build asserts it both ways: the shipped DLL must contain none of its markers, and a development build must contain all of them. Without the second half, their absence proves nothing except that the check is broken.

We know the reception AI-assisted mods get, and we think the objection is mostly right. What the community actually objects to is not a machine touching a keyboard. It is code nobody understood being published, breaking saves, and being abandoned when the questions start. It is people passing off work they cannot support, and assets they do not own.

That is a fair thing to be angry about, and it is the standard we would rather be measured against than the tooling question. So:

• Every subsystem in this add-on is documented with the reasoning behind it: not what it does, but why it is built that way and what breaks if you change it. If we cannot explain a decision, it is not finished.
• All three repositories are public and GPL-3.0. The review passes, the findings ledgers and the in-game verification write-ups are part of the work. You are invited to check the claims on this page against the code.
• Bugs go to a real ticket with a real person on the other end, and the add-on can file one for you from its Tools tab with your KSP.log attached.

If it turns out badly, the tooling will not be the excuse. That is the deal.

The bot, the add-on and this website are on GitHub. The fastest way to judge whether the work behind this is real is to open Sharing Craft and see what it takes to move one ship between two saves that are not identically modded. That problem is the reason this project exists, and no amount of generated code solves it by itself.

Almost nothing this add-on does would work without mods written by other people, for free, over years. Craft transfer exists as a problem at all because the community made KSP installs so varied that no two are alike, and every hard part of this project is really a piece of somebody else’s work being handled carefully.

TweakScale and KSP-Recall taught us why a scaled part has to be baked rather than re-derived. Textures Unlimited and Reforged Materials Redux are the reason a paint job can cross between two saves at all. RealFuels and Realism Overhaul set the bar for what a transferred craft has to survive. USI-LS, TAC-LS, Snacks, Kerbalism and DeepFreeze are why a stranded crew can be rescued by someone running a completely different life support mod. ReStock and ReStock+ made part substitution possible, ConformalDecals made us fix a renderer we thought was finished, and ModuleManager and CKAN are the ground the whole ecosystem stands on. Parallax, FAR, Principia, RP-1 and blackrack’s Deferred each broke something here and made it better.

None of those authors asked for this, endorsed it, or owe it anything. We do not bundle their work, patch over it, or ask you to install a fork of it. Where this add-on needs one of their mods, it names it, points you at the author, and gets out of the way. If anything here ever handles your mod in a way you would rather it did not, say so and we will change it.