I built the Final Fantasy XIV tracker I wanted instead of the spreadsheet I would ignore

Play a game long enough and eventually it begins generating administrative work.

In Final Fantasy XIV, I am working on the current relic series, the Phantom Weapons. There are 21 combat jobs. Each weapon moves through stages, each job has its own progress, and the question is never merely “What have I finished?” It is also “What do I feel like working on next?”

I had been carrying too much of that in my head. A spreadsheet was the obvious answer, which was unfortunate because I knew exactly how that story would end. I would build a perfectly respectable grid, use it with enthusiasm for a short period, and then stop opening it because it felt like a spreadsheet.

A little armory sounded much better than a better spreadsheet.

So I described it to AI. It needed all 21 combat jobs, the current Phantom Weapon stages, job and weapon imagery, and a priority order I could change by dragging cards around. It needed to work across devices. It needed to be private. Jason and I both needed access, but our progress, priorities, and character images had to remain separate.

The request quickly became a real software project. The AI researched the current weapon path, organized the data, designed the interface, added sign-in, separated each user's progress, handled image uploads, and deployed the site. I kept making the decisions a generic tracker could not make for me: who it was for, what belonged on the screen, how privacy should work, and what “next” meant in this particular hobby.

Using the first deployed version exposed the parts I had not thought to specify.

When I completed a weapon, I did not want it occupying valuable space near the top like a former employee who had retained a very prominent office. It should move to the bottom. And when I dragged a job card through a long list, the interface fought with page scrolling. I could rearrange my priorities or move through the page, but not gracefully do both.

I brought those problems back. The AI changed the sorting behavior, repaired the drag interaction, and deployed the revision.

Now the public address reveals almost nothing except a ChatGPT sign-in gate. Behind it is Phantom Armory: our character images, our separate progress, every combat job, every current weapon stage, and a list we can arrange around what we actually want to do next.

Phantom Armory is absurdly specific, which is one reason I like it. Nobody was going to launch a commercial product tailored to the way two people approach a Final Fantasy XIV relic grind. The market is, at best, suspiciously small. It only had to fit us.

Now I have the tool I kept wishing existed, and I enjoy using it enough that it may survive long after the respectable spreadsheet would have been abandoned.