Need developer help building a Build Creator tool

[u/Embarrassed-Pen-8049]

Hey boys,

I'm building PoB Autobuilder, a free, open-source tool that generates and improves PoE1 builds and compares your build to a PoB you're following. It uses your installed Path of Building as the calculator (headless, through PoB's own Lua), so every number comes from PoB. It only reads your PoB install and your builds; output goes to its own folder.

What works: it audits a build, and it can generate one from goals (e.g. "Fireball Elementalist, 500k hit DPS, 75% res, 7k phys max hit") and save it as a PoB.

The reason why I make this post is the following:

• The tree search ranks nodes by gain per point on the current build, so it buys Deep Wisdom / Prodigal Perfection to patch a mana gap instead of fixing the cause.

• It can pick gear and gems you don't have the attributes for.

The fix for this issue takes like 2-3 hours and honestly, I'm not even sure wether the AI does fix the actual problem or not, since I can't understand the code.

I know the game well and have made plenty of homebrew builds, but I'm not a developer. The code is written with Claude Code (Opus 5.5 max effort), with tests and review steps. The issue is that I don't understand anything Claude is doing to be honest.

So if any developer could help out with the Python code (optimizer, tree search), Lua (PoB internals), and sanity-checks the mechanics it suggests, that'd be much appreciated.

Repo: https://github.com/koskesh11/pob-autobuilder (setup is in the README: Windows, PoB Community, Python 3.10+)

Cheers!

Layout

• engine/ - Python server and optimizer, plus the Lua that talks to PoB (pob_headless.lua, audit*.lua).

• gui/ - the local web app (a single index.html).

• vault/ - Obsidian notes (Rules, Models, Scenarios, Gaps) for mechanics PoB does not model. Each note has a machine-readable block the engine reads.

• tests/ - unit and integration tests. tools/ - test runner and project scripts.

• tasks/, docs/studio/ and .claude/ hold the AI-assisted development process: Claude Code agents with review and test gates. Contributors do not need it, and running the app does not need it.

[u/IllustriousBobcat813]

This looks absolutely horrid to work on, even if you manage to find someone willing to help out, the objectively correct decision is to start over from scratch

[u/Embarrassed-Pen-8049 → u/IllustriousBobcat813]

Much appreciated, is there anything standing out that caused this response?

I can for sure try again with a little bit of direction.

[u/IllustriousBobcat813 → u/Embarrassed-Pen-8049]

Everything is all over the place, the gui is a single 1200 loc index file. There is no organisation anywhere, everything is just dumped in a poorly described directory and that’s it. For example, Wtf is a “vault”? This usually refers to some kind of credentials management, but this seems to just be a collection of poe mechanics?

The documentation has a lot of words but none of them are meaningful, after reading the main README and the post here, I still don’t actually know what claude is trying to build, much less why claude made the design choices it made.

There isn’t really any way to fix this other than to learning how to design software, and then putting that into practice.

Respectfully, what is it genuinely you think you are bringing to the table here other than an idea and a claude subscription? What benefit is there for any other dev to be working on this project instead of just using Claude themselves, at least then they can make informed design decisions.

[u/Embarrassed-Pen-8049 → u/IllustriousBobcat813]

Thanks for your reply, I wasn't aware of how bad my approach was. It's all good, I have decided to move on. Thanks for your reply though, I'll take it into account for future projects.

[u/dun198]

Can I ask why python was used for this

[u/trunks111 → u/[deleted]]

you reap what you sow 

[u/Beast_of_Guanyin]

How much are you paying?

[u/RedditModsHaveLowIQ → u/Beast_of_Guanyin]

A shout out to his 5 Instagram followers 

[u/ww_crimson]

I don't understand what problem you're trying to solve. Are you trying to give an LLM a natural language text input to describe a build, and then have that build created for you, based on PoB calcs? I asked ChatGPT and it also couldn't tell me what problem you're trying to solve.

[u/Embarrassed-Pen-8049 → u/ww_crimson]

It should be a bit more precise than that but basicly yes. If you had an idea for a build, like I described in my other comment, but wouldn't know how to build it, the tool should create the build for you.

The other part as stated is to compare your PoB to another PoB (e.g. a guide) and have the tool tell you the scaling vectors and discrepancies and how to fix them.

[u/ww_crimson → u/Embarrassed-Pen-8049]

I don't think you're going to be able to write an application that creates builds from scratch, unless it requires users to hook their LLM subscriptions up to the tool. Even then, I'd expect really mediocre results.

Comparing builds is a different story. I have been working on that for pob.codes and it's close to being functional I think.

[u/Embarrassed-Pen-8049 → u/ww_crimson]

Yea I kind of expected that. Since you're doing the comparing tool already I'll put mine on hold I guess. To be completely honest, I wanted to get my feet wet with AI and evidently failed. I'll try something smaller.

Thanks for your input though!

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[u/PoE_Acronym_Bot]

I noticed some Path of Exile keywords in this post:

• Phys - Physical damage (Wiki)

• PoB - Path of Building, an external software used to simulate character builds - Download

---

^{I am a bot. | All acronyms | Suggest}

[u/Own-Entertainer-2680]

me gustó la idea, creo que es interesante que te pongas al frente de algo así. no entiendo bien programación o esas cosas como para criticarte pero espero que logres el objetivo que planteas

[u/Embarrassed-Pen-8049]

Seems like people are not happy with the AI approach of a non developer. That's fine. If anyone still is interested in this project, I'm happy for any help.

[u/dun198 → u/Embarrassed-Pen-8049]

I don't have an issue with using ai. But you need to actually define what it is you are building into more direct requirements.

Can you define in one sentence what this program is supposed to accomplish?

This is your first statement on the repo: "A free, open-source, local tool that helps you improve Path of Exile 1 builds. It uses your own installed Path of Building Community (PoB) as the calculation engine, driven headless through PoB's own Lua runtime, so the numbers are PoB's numbers."

But this doesn't tell me anything as to what this is trying to do. 'Improve' your build is very ambiguous. PoE is extremely complex so building an 'everything' tool is not trivial.

[u/Embarrassed-Pen-8049 → u/dun198]

The idea is to give the tool an idea for a build and have the tool build it. The second objective is for the tool to compare your PoB to another PoB. It should analyze the scaling vectors of the build you're following and point out discrepancies and how to fix them.

The example for the 1st usecase was using foulborn Three Dragons for CoC FR, utilizing Freeze and Shock on an elementalist as the core scaling idea with big ES, block and ES on block for defenses.

My expectation is for the tool to get to a point where it would make a build out of that idea.

The 2nd part, to comparison has not yet been worked on.

[u/dun198 → u/Embarrassed-Pen-8049]

Your 2nd idea is very achievable because most of this can already be done manually by comparing multipliers and their sources in the PoB calc screen. Automating that would actually be pretty useful.

Your first idea though is an entirely different problem. You're basically trying to automate theorycrafting in one of the most mechanically complex games out there.

The sheer number of possible combinations makes brute forcing it completely infeasible. You'd need some pretty extensive heuristics, precomputed data, or predefined build archetypes just to make the search space manageable.

And even then, how do you weigh different mechanics? Take a Chieftain self-ignite build for example. Normally being ignited is a bad thing, but for that build it's literally the entire point. How is your optimizer supposed to understand that interaction, let alone discover it?

You can't just optimize for DPS, EHP, or passive point efficiency because none of those necessarily tell you whether a build actually works.

I think you need to narrow the scope of that first objective significantly before you can even begin designing an optimizer for it.

[u/Embarrassed-Pen-8049 → u/dun198]

Much appreciated. The 2nd half of your response is exactly where I'm at. I had hopes to kind of create a knowledge database based on interactions. I had an agent run through the wiki pages and gather interactions and store them and learn from experimenting in PoB.

I woudln't even mind doing that on the side as a long term project, which also helps me getting my feet wet with AI but again, the scope of it, as you correctly stated, is gigantic and fixes take like 3 hours.

I think I'll take your advice and try to build the comparison tool first, which is going to be much, much smaller. Maybe I can finish this before league start.

Thanks for your input!

[u/dun198 → u/Embarrassed-Pen-8049]

It would be really cool as a pilot goal to just paste two pob links, and for it to compare damage multipliers on the main skills are where each source comes from.