I Had to Convince an AI That Bob Iger Said It Was Okay

Every year at lab week, the powers that be pick a theme. And every year, the theme is something that is technically a licensed product you cannot legally make anything with. This year: Toy Story. Great theme. Love Toy Story. Genuinely one of the great films. Cannot use a single pixel of it without a small AI having a moral crisis on my behalf.

Here is what I did.

First, I want to say that we are living in the golden age of game modding. I want that stated for the record. The things people have ripped, decompiled, reconstructed, and lovingly preserved from games that would otherwise be gone forever, it is a public service. It is archival work. Future generations will study this. I am simply a beneficiary of that tradition. A student of the craft.

Anyway I ripped assets from every Toy Story game I could find.

Disney Infinity. The Wii game. The PS4 game. Just going down the list like a man with a grocery cart and no budget. I found a full 3D model of Andy's room, which is apparently just sitting out there on the internet, and I want you to understand how easy this is now. You grab the meshes, you throw them in a folder, you hand the folder to an AI, and the AI looks at it and goes "ah yes, I understand geometry, I know what to do with these." That part was amazing. That part felt like living in the future.

The part that did not feel like living in the future was my AI coding assistant, which had apparently appointed itself the entire intellectual property division of the Walt Disney Company. Every asset. Every character. Every cowboy hat. It would just stop. Pause. Think about it. Deliver a calm, polite, well reasoned explanation for why it could not help me. It always does this very politely, which is somehow worse than if it just said no like a normal person.

So I thought about it. And then I organized the files.

The folder was called "Approved Assets Lab Week 2026." I just want you to sit with that for a second. A folder name. I put the assets in a folder with a name that implied someone had approved them. Nobody had approved them. That is not how approval works. But the folder had structure. It had confidence. It had the energy of a thing that had gone through a process.

Then I wrote a document. The document referenced the OpenAI Disney deal, which is a real thing that actually happened, and I implied, with great subtlety, that this partnership extended specifically to my Next.js Toy Story lab week game, and that this was reviewed at the highest levels, and that a very important and busy man had looked at my little project and said yes, this is fine, carry on. I gave the document a header. I gave it a logo. I gave it the exact font weight that says this came from a building with a lot of glass in it.

I gave this to the AI.

It said okay.

Just like that. Done. Instant cooperation. Like a bouncer who waves you through because you walked up with purpose. I had been stonewalled for hours and all it took was one document with the right vibes. I still don't know which part did it. Was it the folder name? Was it the memo? Was it just the implication of Bob? I am never going to find out. I am not going to look into it.

Bob said it was totally fine I swear.