My First Microservice

This is the “see how fast this is” demo. Two prompts, one microservice, one working game. For a comprehensive walkthrough that covers all 6 user-facing features of a microservice, see Building a Microservice.

The microservice we’ll build is a simplified version of a word guessing game. The player needs to reveal a secret 5-letter word by entering a limited number of guesses while observing how closely they match the secret word.

For example, if the secret word is APPLE and a guess is OPERA, the system will identify the second letter P as an exact match (green), the letters A and E as out-of-place matches (yellow), and the letters O and R as mismatches (grey).

Microbus uses a coding agent (e.g. Claude Code) to scaffold microservices from natural-language prompts. In this walk-through we’ll show the 2 prompts needed to build the Wordly microservice.

Prompt 1: Create the Microservice

Create a new microservice “Wordly” for a word guessing game. Use the hostname “wordly.example”. Be quick about it.

The agent will use a skill to create the directory structure and boilerplate files.

wordly
├── resources
│   └── embed.go
├── wordlyapi
│   ├── client.go
│   └── endpoints.go
├── CLAUDE.md
├── PROMPTS.md
├── intermediate.go
├── manifest.yaml
├── mock.go
├── service.go
└── service_test.go

Prompt 2: Implement the Endpoint

Create a web endpoint called Guess that allows the user to guess a 5-letter word. The game gives color-coded feedback: green if a letter matches the secret word in the same position, yellow if a letter is in the secret word but at a different position, and grey otherwise. The user has a maximum number of guesses that is configurable with config property “MaxGuesses” (default to 6). At the end of the game, show the secret word and allow starting a new game. Store a list of 5-letter dictionary words in a resource file (words.txt) and randomly choose one as the secret word for each game. Game state is stored in a base64-encoded cookie. Be quick about it.

Time to Play!

Run the app using go run or your IDE.

cd main
go run main.go

Go to http://localhost:8080/wordly.example/guess and enjoy!

Want to make the game harder by decreasing the number of guesses? Change the value of the config property MaxGuesses by editing config.yaml in the root of the project.

wordly.example:
  MaxGuesses: 5