Why I stopped using generic AI tools for game development and built my own

Last year I was using various AI coding assistants on a game project. They worked fine for generic tasks, but kept failing in ways that were specific to game dev: The AI would happily edit files inside our auto-generated config directory. Every time I had to explain: "that's generated from Excel, you need to edit the source and re-run the pipeline." It never remembered. It would write GetComponent<T>() inside Update() — a classic Unity performance trap that any experienced game dev knows to avoid. But the AI doesn't know it's writing hot-path code. And my favorite: it would declare a task "done" without ever running a build. In a Unity project. Where compile errors can hide for 30 seconds before they show up. I got tired of babysitting, so I started building Danya. ## The core idea Most AI coding assistants drop you into a blank slate. If you want them to work well on a game project, you need to spend hours writing rules, configuring hooks, setting up review checks — essentially