A Very VAPI Birthday

My girlfriend's birthday gifts were ready weeks early, and handing someone a stack of gifts takes about ninety seconds. I wanted her to find them, and I wanted to walk next to her and watch her figure it out, with no job to do. So the hunt had to run itself. I built all of it in one night.

• The diary. An NFC sticker hid inside the cover. She tapped her phone to the book, and a fake macOS desktop I built in v0 opened, with a clue on it.
• The puzzle. A photo of us, printed as segments to arrange. Put together, the clue on its back pointed at the diary's spine, where a phone number was rolled up inside.
• The voice on the phone. The number reached Aldrin, a VAPI voice agent with a custom voice and adventure music underneath. "Ah, greetings, traveler." He wouldn't start the quest until she said a passphrase.
• Out in the world. A gift in a friend's car frunk, keywords spoken back to Aldrin, a riddle, and a cafe where one last passphrase got her the final gift.

At the cafe, crowd noise turned out to be the one thing no amount of prompt tuning had prepared Aldrin for. Nothing else in the hunt was exotic: an NFC sticker, a v0 prototype, a voice agent, a slip of paper. The interesting work was never in any single tool. It was in the seams.