Realer Mock Draft: Yesterday's App, Today's 134 Lines of Text
- Tens of millions of NFL fantasy players are furiously preparing for their upcoming league draft by doing “mock drafts” to anticipate their league mates.
- But your league mates don't draft like robots, they have irrational biases and incomplete information — so I developed the Realer Mock Draft, based on your league!
- 12 months ago this would have required a full app and significant build phase; today it's just 134 lines of text to hand to your AI agent. This dramatic shift transfers to other, less trivial, domains!
The Problem
A typical NFL fantasy draft has the participants assigned a draft order and they sequentially choose NFL players based on player rankings and average draft positions (ADP) until they have a full roster for the upcoming season. For instance, you might be in a 10-person league and assigned draft spot 4, meaning you make the 4th selection of an NFL player. This draft order influences your strategy to select your roster.
It's common for people to do “mock drafts” in preparation, however these simulations are usually based on player rankings, with no regard for the previous drafting behaviour of your league mates.
Ideally, a mock draft would overlay player rankings with the drafting tendencies of the people in your league, based on their previous draft results and your perspective of their strategy.
The Solution
Popular NFL fantasy app Sleeper has a read-only API (to be used responsibly) with league data including historical draft results!
This enables you to analyse your league mates' biases towards players and teams they repeatedly draft over the years, hyped players based on recent headlines and ensure your mock draft more closely resembles the chaos of draft day.
The Realer Mock Draft Skill in 134 lines of plain English instructs your chosen AI agent to:
- Request your Sleeper league ID, then your AI will retrieve the current members and previous drafts to inform your mock draft
- Prompt you to confirm which username is yours and provide notes on the drafting behaviour of your league mates
- Provide details of your draft position, draft format and preferred player ranking source
- Your AI will create a mock draft with a user interface that runs in your AI chat window
- Finally, you'll receive feedback on your drafting strategy
- Repeat to refine your drafting strategy!
Why a Skill?
- A “Skill” refers to a “standardized way to give AI agents new capabilities and expertise” and usually takes the form of a text file (in markdown format) with optional scripts, references, and assets to leverage the tools within current AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude
- The Agent Skills format provides a standardised template, familiar to any AI agent as per below:
my-skill/
├── SKILL.md # Required: metadata + instructions
├── scripts/ # Optional: executable code
├── references/ # Optional: documentation
├── assets/ # Optional: templates, resources
└── ... # Any additional files or directoriesLimitations
- Despite ChatGPT and Claude on mobile seeming the same as the Desktop versions, in testing the Sleeper API could only be reached from ChatGPT desktop. These differing capabilities are not easily discoverable by users.
- The current Realer Mock Draft skill has no specification for how the UI should look or specific formulas for drafting — including these details with the skill would provide a more consistent experience for users.
Conclusion
- An idea to provide NFL fantasy enthusiasts with a superior mock draft experience, based on their actual league mates, was delivered in just 134 lines of text as Realer Mock Draft to hand off to your AI agent of choice.
- The importance of quality context to deliver functionality generalises across domains, negating the need for significant development time to deliver an app in some cases.
- Currently, popular AI tools ChatGPT and Claude don't support all the features required for Realer Mock Draft on both desktop and mobile — a point of confusion for users.