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My daughter’s media player has several tabs now — a general folder of nursery rhymes, hymns, classical pieces and kids’ pop songs; a folder of folk songs I made pictures for myself; a Bible-verse song folder; and a couple of separately purchased audiobook and story collections. On her own device, she picks what she wants by tapping a cover picture, the same as always. That device is Wi-Fi only, though, and it stays home — it isn’t a phone with its own data plan, so it never comes along in the car. The problem was everywhere outside our own Wi-Fi. ...

My daughter’s nursery-rhyme tab gives every song a picture instead of a title, so she can tap a cover without reading a word she doesn’t know yet. Most of those pictures are AI-drawn. Last week I swapped one of them for a plain photo — acorns I’d picked up on a hike that same afternoon — and she noticed before I said anything about it. The Need: A Picture Has to Match Something She Knows This tab works the way I’ve written about before: one still picture per song, tap it, hear it. No scrolling list of titles she can’t read. For most songs, an AI-drawn illustration is enough — a frog on a lily pad, a rabbit under the moon. She matches the picture to a song she already half-remembers from bedtime. ...

I have access to a university library, so I can pull almost any academic paper I want. What I don’t have is a way to know which ones are worth pulling. So I asked Claude Code to help me build a small site that checks a handful of research fields every morning and shows me the papers that are actually generating buzz that day, not just the ones that happen to match a keyword search. ...

I have a feature in my Bible app that I am quietly proud of. This feature connects Old Testament and New Testament verses that point to the same idea—one side is the shadow, the other is its fulfillment. It lets me bring up these pairs as I read. Until this past week, what the app could not do was show where these pairs came from when there were two different sources for the list. ...

I scan my daughter’s picture books, page by page, so she can flip through them on a tablet the same way she flips through the paper ones. Turning a folder of page photos into something that reads like an actual book means two things: straightening out crooked, badly cropped scans, and getting the pages into the right order — cover first, then left-right spreads, back cover last. I asked Claude Code to do both. It could do both. But doing both, every time, on every new book, was burning through my usage far faster than the work seemed to justify. ...

My daughter asked me to draw her a shark. I can’t draw. What I can do is open Claude Code and describe what I need, so that’s what I did — and it turned into a small, ongoing project of making coloring pages for a 3-year-old. The Need: A Blank Page, on Demand Store-bought coloring books run out, and they’re never quite the right animal on the right day. My daughter wanted a shark family — a papa shark, a baby shark — right then, not the next time we happened to be at a bookstore. What I actually needed was a way to turn “draw me a shark” into a printable page in a few minutes, using tools I already had open. ...

Most of the 36 pictures in part one got one AI generation and, at most, one round of revisions — generate, glance, done. One took five. It’s 오빠 생각, “Thinking of My Brother,” an old Korean folk song, the kind of thing grandparents still hum — and one of the few songs in that whole library I’ve actually sung to my daughter myself, at bedtime, not just something we play from a folder. ...

I have a set of Korean children’s Bible verse audios. It’s a set of 10 short verses. Each verse is set to a simple song. This helps with memorization. This set was in a folder structure, just like the nursery rhymes I talked about in Part 1. It had the actual audio files and a list of titles. A three-year-old child cannot read these titles. The idea of one picture per item already worked once. So, this became the next clear candidate. Honestly, this was the part I cared about most. ...

My daughter is three. She can’t read yet, which means for months there was a whole folder of songs in her Kids Player that only I could operate. She’d point at the tab, I’d scroll the list of titles, and she’d wait for me to land on the right one. She could listen to the songs. She just couldn’t choose one herself. That’s a small thing, but it bothered me more than I expected. Everything else in her player — her audiobook sets, her story tab — she already drives on her own, by tapping a cover image. This one folder of family and folk songs was the exception, and the only reason was that it had titles instead of pictures. ...

I asked for a hunter’s pistol to become a rifle. Everything else in the picture stayed exactly the same — same animals, same background, same pose. Clean, one-item edit. A few days later I asked for two things in the same request: add a conch shell that belongs in the scene, and remove a child who shouldn’t be in it. Half the animals the song’s lyrics called for vanished. Nothing I’d asked to touch. ...