The Doodle Principle in Practice: Solar Explorer
How a weekend, an AI, and a childhood memory became a solar system.
I wrote the Doodle Principle to share how AI can help you do things you couldn’t without it. I demonstrated the concept by building a photorealistic solar system simulator from scratch last weekend. I’m not a coder. I’m an IT program director with 25 years of enterprise delivery experience. I could not have done it without AI help.
Here’s the web page I built to support it.
It started with a memory. One of my favorite games growing up was The Halley Project — a first-person space exploration game that made you feel like you were actually out there. I’ve never found anything that captured that feeling the same way. So instead of looking for it, I built it.
That’s The Doodle Principle in action. Start with curiosity. Follow it somewhere.
What I built
Solar Explorer is a photorealistic, first-person solar system simulator that runs in any browser — no download, no install. It covers all 8 planets, the Sun, Pluto, and 40+ moons, each with procedural shaders, real orbital mechanics, and textures from NASA missions. Earth has city lights and auroras. Saturn has ring shadows. Pluto has Charon orbiting as a true binary system.
It took 12 hours of keyboard time over 3 days and produced 29,000 lines of Git-tracked code.
I used Claude and Fable 5 — Anthropic’s agentic coding tool — to build it. I spent about an hour in design and architecture with Claude before asking for a Claude Code prompt. It returned a 550-line prompt. Thirty minutes later I had a working Jupiter system in my browser and I couldn’t stop.
What it taught me
This project is a microcosm of building a software project, but it could have been anything. I owned the product vision, the architecture decisions, user acceptance testing, and even compliance — cookie consent, privacy policy, security headers. Claude and Fable handled engineering, testing, and implementation under my direction.
Could I have built this without AI? Absolutely not. Could a team have built it? Yes — in weeks or months. I did it in a weekend.
That’s not a small thing. The tools have finally caught up to the imagination. The barrier isn’t technical skill anymore. It’s the decision to start.
Try it
Launch Solar Explorer. It works in any browser, no install required.
This project is a live demonstration of the ideas in The Doodle Principle. If it sparked something for you — curiosity, an idea, a what-if — that’s exactly the point.
What have you built with AI? I’d love to hear it — reply below or find me on LinkedIn.