Michael Davis

I wanted a better map, so I built one. It got slightly out of hand.

SOFTWARE, MOSTLY.
SINCE JUL 2025.

01 / THE BEGINNING
JUL 2025
ORIGIN

In July 2025 I wasn't building software. I was trying to work out what order to visit a couple of hundred stars in, and the in-game map is not built for that.

So I made Scout Optimizer. No map. You give it a start system and a radius, and the tab just chews on a route. That was the first thing I got an LLM to produce that actually ran, and the first time I put something on the internet.

None of what follows was a plan. Scout Optimizer did not know about gates, and it could not show you anything. That limitation is why the map exists.

PROBLEMVISIT ORDER
SCOUT OPTIMIZERSTART + RADIUS
LIMITATIONNO GATES
EF-MAPGATES + VISUALS

02 / THINGS THAT GOT BUILTSELECTED BUILDS · SINCE JUL 2025

EF-Map

● LIVEAUG 2025 –ABOUT 24,000 SYSTEMSEVE FRONTIER

It started as a better map. It is now routing, reachability, activity, structures, search, overlays and history. Most of the questions people were asking in chat, answered in one place.

FIG. 01 · TOPOLOGY, ROUTE SOLVE AND DATA OVERLAYS · SCHEMATICABOUT 24,000 SYSTEMS

ORIGIN

SYSTEM· SMART ASSEMBLY

SYSTEM· ACTIVITY

SYSTEM

DESTINATION

OFF-ROUTE BRANCHES NOT SHOWNSOME SYSTEMS OUTSIDE JUMP RANGE

FIG. 01 · ROUTE SOLVE · SCHEMATIC
ABOUT 24,000 SYSTEMS

OVERLAYS ·ROUTINGREACHABILITYACTIVITYSTRUCTURESSEARCHHISTORY

RootFit

● LIVEJUN 2026EVE FRONTIERFITTING

Fitting in EVE Frontier is a packing problem, not a slot list. RootFit is a browser planner on the real hull grid, using data pulled from the client, so you can try a fit before you spend the materials.

HULL CELLSMODULESPOWERSPACEHEAT

FIG. 02 · HULL GRID AND MODULE PACKING · SCHEMATIC

EF Helper

● LIVEOCT 2025WINDOWSDX12

This one is not a website. EF Helper is a Windows app: C++ talking to a DirectX 12 overlay inside the EVE Frontier client, and to EF-Map over localhost. Routes show up in-game. I put it on the Microsoft Store.

MICROSOFT STORE

GAME CLIENT

EVE FRONTIER

OVERLAY

DX12 · IMGUI
INJECTED

HELPER

WIN32
LOCALHOST

EF-MAP

ROUTES
TELEMETRY

FIG. 03 · NATIVE BRIDGE, NOT ANOTHER WEB APP

FRONTIER COMMERCE

A commerce layer, reused.

Open-source payment infrastructure for Sui applications: one-off payments, subscriptions and entitlements, prepaid credits, merchant treasuries, revenue splits, refunds. Written once, so the next application doesn't have to invent its own payment plumbing.

JUL 2026SUIPUBLIC REPO

APPLICATION

↑ USER

ANY OTHER APP

FRONTIER
COMMERCE

REUSABLE LAYER
AUTHORITY SEPARATED

PAYMENTS

ENTITLEMENTS
SUBSCRIPTIONS · CREDITS

TREASURY
SPLITS · REFUNDS

AROUND IT ·GAS SPONSORSHIPEVENT INDEXINGRECONCILIATION

FIG. 04 · WHAT AN APPLICATION GETS TO STOP BUILDING

Civilization Control

● LIVEMAR 2026 –HACKATHON, THEN KEPT GOING

OWNERSHIP
CAPABILITY

GOVERNANCE

AUTHORITY IS THE CAPABILITY
YOU ACTUALLY HOLD

Operating EVE Frontier infrastructure from a browser: smart gates, turrets, storage and trade structures, instead of hand-assembling Sui transactions to do it.

SMART GATE

ACCESS POLICY
POWER ON / OFF

TURRET

DEFENSIVE POSTURE
POWER ON / OFF

STORAGE / TRADE

TRADE TERMS
COMMERCIAL POSTURE

INFRASTRUCTURE NETWORK STATEEVENT FEED

FIG. 05 · CAPABILITY, CONTROL AND NETWORK STATE

Shadow Broker Protocol

MAR 2026HACKATHONSUI · WALRUS · SEALPUBLIC REPO

A marketplace for intelligence you can't show before selling it. Encrypt it locally, store it on Walrus, publish two seconds of it, and sell ownership in a single atomic transaction. Nobody holds anybody's money.

SELLERINTELENCRYPTWALRUSINTELOBJECT

PROOF2 SEC TEASERBUYER DECISION

BUYERATOMIC PURCHASESEAL RELEASES KEYDECRYPT

FIG. 06 · ENCRYPT, PROVE, SELL, RELEASEATOMIC SETTLEMENT · NO ESCROW

ALONG THE WAY

SCOUT OPTIMIZERJUL 2025

Still live, still no map. The thing that started this.

SSU OPEN SHELFJUL 2026

A Smart Storage Unit where the hangar is a shared shelf. Anyone can take, once the owner turns it on.

FLAPPY FRONTIERMAR 2026

A silly game for the same hackathon. The standalone site is retired. The game now lives inside EF-Map.

EO-Map

● LIVEAUG 2026 –EVE ONLINE3D

Almost a year after EF-Map, I pointed the same idea at EVE Online. It started as a 3D map and a route planner. Sovereignty, faction warfare, incursions and traffic have already started attaching themselves to it. It is new. It is already more than a map.

THE SAME SYSTEMS

FIG. 07 · SAME TOPOLOGY, THREE STATES · SCHEMATIC, NOT MEASUREDAMBER = SELECTED ROUTE

THE SAME SYSTEMS

ROUTING

SOVEREIGNTY

FW / INCURSIONS

FIG. 07 · SAME TOPOLOGY, THREE STATES
SCHEMATIC, NOT MEASURED

03 / WHAT HAPPENED BECAUSE OF ITSIDE EFFECTS

MAR 2026
HACKATHON

Two of the things above came out of the same EVE Frontier hackathon. Civilization Control placed third overall. Shadow Broker Protocol won the weirdest-idea category, which still makes me laugh a bit.

THIRD OVERALL
WEIRDEST IDEA

2026
FANFEST

I ended up on stage at FanFest talking about EF-Map to a room of people who actually use it.

ONE TALK

AUG 2026
LUMINAIRES

The tools also led to me joining the first Conclave of Luminaries, a player group that talks directly with the studio.

CATALYST, NOT A BADGE

CONTINUOUS
USERS

People use EF-Map to decide whether a route is worth flying. They find the wrong number before I do, and they tell me about it.

THIS IS THE PART
THAT CHANGED THINGS

2025 –
COMMUNITY

Almost all of this happened because of EVE Frontier and the people around it. That's where the problems came from, and the bug reports.

CATALYST, NOT THEME

ONGOING
INFRASTRUCTURE

Which means ingest, caching, uptime, and keeping the lights on after a game patch. I did not have that job in 2025.

STILL RUNNING

04 / HOW I WORK NOW

I don't write much
of the code.

I still don't. I write what I want, and I write what done has to look like, usually with an LLM helping me think it through. An agent does the implementation on a branch. The actual work is deciding what should exist, and refusing the version that isn't right.

FIG. 08 · ONE CHANGE, END TO ENDSOLID = MAIN PATH · DASHED = ITERATION · AMBER = LIVE

HUMANINTENT

HUMANARCHITECTURE / SPEC

AGENTCODING AGENT
→ BRANCH

AUTOTESTS · BUILD
→ PREVIEW

HUMANREVIEW · SMOKE TEST
ITERATE IF NEEDED

HUMANCOMMIT / PUSH

LIVEPRODUCTION

USERSFIND WHAT I MISSED
AND AROUND AGAIN

FIG. 08 · ONE CHANGE, END TO END
SOLID = MAIN PATH · DASHED = ITERATION

The sentence at the top of this section is doing a considerable amount of hiding.

05 / NOW

Currently: EO-Map, which is new enough that I'm still finding out what it wants to become, and the parts of EF-Map I built before I knew better.

If you use one of these and it's wrong, tell me. That's usually how it gets fixed.

ELSEWHERE

GITHUB EF-MAP EO-MAP