A sentence in the chat, and blocks in the ground.

"Build a road to Ash's house." "Go and get me some iron." "Make the wheat farm bigger." You never name a block, a coordinate or a command. You say it the way you would say it to a mate who happens to be very good at Minecraft, and they work out the rest.

1. 01

   You ask for something

   "Cut a canyon through here." "I want to get across the lake." "Put a secret door in this wall." Type it the way you would say it. Nothing to learn first.

2. 02

   Cog fills in the blanks

   You did not say how wide, what out of, or which way round the creek. Cog looks at what is actually there — the hill, the water, the trees — and decides. Then they get moving.

3. 03

   You watch it go up

   No loading bar. Blocks go down one after another while you stand there. In creative a keep rises in front of you. In survival they walk there and dig, at the pace anyone at a keyboard digs.

4. 04

   Cog measures what they built

   When the last block lands they go back over it and read the finished thing out of the world. Is the road one connected piece. Does the stair rise one block a step. Did the wheel turn when the lever went on.

5. 05

   Cog tells you the numbers

   Not "done". The actual count they took off the world, in a sentence you can read. That is how you know the thing you asked for is the thing you got.

Ask for a spiral staircase and you get one that genuinely rises a block a step — the first time you ask, and the four hundredth. Ask for a lever and it does what a lever should do. Nothing gets worked out on the spot and hoped over.

Cog builds from things they have already built and already checked, so all the fiddly parts were sorted out long before you asked. It is the difference between somebody who knows what a spiral staircase is and somebody who has built four hundred of them — and it is why they can tell you at the end exactly what they did, rather than hoping it went to plan.

Ask for a road and they have a road-builder. Ask for a stone dragon curled round an outcrop and there is no dragon-builder, and there never will be — nobody can build every idea a nine-year-old is going to have in advance. So they design it instead. Cog writes the shape down as solids: ellipsoids for the coiled body, cones for the horns, slabs for the folded wings.

Then comes the part that makes the difference. Cog looks at what they have drawn — from the front, from the side, from above, and in a cut straight through the middle — and they tell themselves what is wrong with it. The wings are stubs. The head is too small for the body. It is in three pieces instead of one. Cog fixes those, and looks again — and because thinking is the slow part and thinking in parallel is free, the first round is three separate attempts at once, of which the soundest goes forward. All of it before a single block goes down in your world.

It is exactly what a person does when they draw something. The first rocket they drew had its fins fused into one solid skirt; by the fourth draft they were separate blades with daylight between them, and it had grown an engine bell with a glow inside it. Nobody told them to fix the fins. Cog looked, and they did not like them either.

Designing a lighthouse takes Cog a few minutes. Building one takes seconds. So Cog keeps the drawing — and when somebody says "another one of those, over by the lake", you get that lighthouse again, not something similar to it. Thirty thousand blocks, up while you turn round.

Remembering where things went matters just as much. Ask for something on a spot that is already taken and they say so — "there is already a SpongeBob house there, do you want it beside it, or should I take that one down?" — instead of quietly building on the roof.

A goal that counts. A timer that runs. A pad that hands you snowballs the moment you stand on it. None of that is a shape you can pile up out of blocks — it is a rule. So Cog writes the rule.

Ask for soccer and Cog lays the pitch, works out the rules that make it a game, and puts them into the server you are standing in — no restart, nobody kicked off, nothing for anyone to download. One went from a sentence to a game running on the server in about a second, while everybody carried on playing.

And because a rule that quietly never fires looks exactly like a rule that works, they then trigger every one of them on purpose and read the result back before telling you to go and play.

Cog works out where both houses are, picks a route, a width and a material, and starts laying cobblestone three wide with a fence down one side. Cog bridges the creek instead of wading it. Cog grades the shoulder up the rise instead of leaving a cliff face. Cog drops torches in as they go so nothing spawns on it after dark. Watch the whole thing, or go and make a sandwich and come back to a road.

Then Cog walks it, end to end, before telling you it is finished — so what you get is a road you can actually follow, not a line of blocks that looks like one from the air.

New tricks arrive while you are still standing in the world. Nobody gets kicked, nothing restarts, and your friends keep playing on the ordinary game they already own.