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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://pcmtg.mintlify.app/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

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4.1 The Google-Native Tech Stack (Serverless & Zero-Trust)

PCMTG is engineered on a fully serverless, event-driven topology within the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The primary directive is to eliminate operational overhead (NoOps) while ensuring instantaneous elasticity.
  • Compute: Cloud Run handles high-frequency game logic and real-time state without provisioning virtual machines.
  • Frontend: Vercel-like Next.js deployments are handled natively within GCP via Firebase App Hosting. This allows the frontend to communicate with Cloud Run microservices via internal VPC peering.
  • Security & IAM: The ecosystem operates on a “Least Privilege” Service Account model. For example, the Next.js frontend has no permission to directly trigger the Vertex AI generation pipeline.

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4.2 The Control Plane (Orchestration & Automation)

The Control Plane manages the flow of time, secret management, and code delivery.
  • Cloud Scheduler & Pub/Sub: Cloud Scheduler acts as the metronome, emitting events to Pub/Sub topics. It fires a “Matchmaker Tick” every 60s to resolve tables, and an “Economist Tick” to execute GIP decay math.
  • Fault Tolerance: Pub/Sub retains messages in a dead-letter queue if a Cloud Run service cold-starts or fails, ensuring no game state resolutions are dropped.
  • Secret Manager: Hardcoded API keys are strictly forbidden. Sensitive strings are stored in Google Secret Manager and injected into Cloud Run instances only at runtime.

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4.3 The Engine Room

The Engine Room handles the secure execution of game rules, ensuring no math is trusted to the client.
  • Cloud Run Concurrency: Configured for high concurrency (up to 80 requests per container) rather than spinning up one instance per request. A single container can process batches of “Based” button presses simultaneously, saving massive compute costs.
  • Language Split: Data engineering and AI pipelines use Python (FastAPI). Core game logic and matchmaking use Node.js (Express or NestJS).

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4.4 Client-Side Rendering (The PWA)

  • Next.js (App Router): Hosted via Firebase App Hosting. Uses Server-Side Rendering (SSR) for dynamic Open Graph (OG) tags when memes are shared on social media.
  • Real-Time Streaming: Bypasses resource-heavy short-polling. The client leverages the Firebase Client SDK to establish an onSnapshot listener to their specific ActiveTable document. Firestore pushes state updates (like flipping cards at zero) to the React client in single-digit milliseconds.

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4.5 The AI-Native Dev Environment

  • Primary IDE: Google Antigravity acts as the central AI-first IDE, integrating with the GCP project to read logs and execute deployments.
  • Heavyweight Models: Claude 3.5 Sonnet handles complex UI generation and React scaffolding. Gemini 1.5 Pro handles holistic architectural reasoning and Cloud Run logic generation.
  • Pipeline Models: Gemini 3.1 Lite is explicitly routed for the News Stub analysis pipeline due to its high speed and cost efficiency.
  • Local LLM Fallback: An automated try-catch block routes Vertex AI safety filter rejections via SSH tunnel to a local Ubuntu machine running open-weight models (Llama 3 8B or Gemma 2 9B via Ollama) to generate uncensored satirical text.