OpenTelemetry for Balatro

I should start this blog post with a witty joke, because that’s one of the key ingredients that make Balatro such a beloved game. However, I can’t come up with one, so here’s a different intro: I am fascinated by the possibility that any software I use could, in theory, emit logs, metrics and traces through OpenTelemetry. And Balatro is software that I use a lot. I’ve spent hundreds of hours with it, the best 2 × 10 euros I’ve ever spent¹. So creating OpenTelemetry for Balatro was a side project I wanted to try out for a long time! It turned out to be one of those projects where I cared more about the outcome than about writing the code myself, so it was a perfect candidate to ask an LLM to build for me!