@shoofle my advice from these sorts of projects is to invest in visual / tactile tooling as early as u can, but prioritize a hacky design that lets u be expressive quickly over a more flexible/robust one with a deferred payoff
if the project survives long enough, u can come back and do things the "right" way, but i find the expected longevity of a project jumps immensely the second it hits the threshold where i can easily generate and "see" a lot of test examples