Action Emotes #1 — development journal
Historical note: Retrospective recollections recorded October 31, 2026, supplemented by source and Git history.
From WeakAuras to a first addon — August 2025
Character expression had already caught my interest through WeakAuras experiments for my orc Madaxe Mokaya in WoW Classic Anniversary. Later, with my warrior Buxbrew on a private server using the older WoW 1.12 client, I wanted similar reactions during ordinary actions. A small addon became the next experiment.
Development happened between an ordinary ChatGPT conversation and local files on my computer. ChatGPT suggested Lua code and revisions; I copied the snippets, created the folders, installed the addon and tested it in-game. Problems and new ideas sent me back to the chat for another attempt. Seeing Buxbrew respond made the effort worthwhile.
The original name, BuxbrewCharge, came from the character and ability, although the code watched a chosen slot rather than Charge alone. The first Lua and manifest commits date to August 18, 2025. Without the complete original chat, those individual debugging exchanges cannot be reconstructed accurately.
What the surviving source reveals
The committed implementation watches a slot through a UseAction wrapper, delegates to the original action and selects a built-in emote after a 21-second cooldown. A November 1, 2025 revision reduced the pool from 20 to ten tokens. On January 10, 2026, command parsing changed from string.match to string.find. The diffs establish what changed, not why.
Recovering the story — October 2026
An AI-assisted documentation review on October 26 expanded the project record and identified the unresolved BuxbreCharge.toc packaging issue. No new in-game test was performed.
On October 31, the fuller history of my first addon became part of the documentation. To distinguish it from successors, I chose Action Emotes #1 as the project name and kept the original server unnamed in the public account. AI helped assemble and refine the first-person narrative; creative direction and original local testing remain my own.
This journal is a retrospective reconstruction, not a recovered development transcript. Packaging, current client behavior, interoperability with other UseAction addons and comparisons with later variants remain unverified.
Document information
Creative: Babuni