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. ...
Part three was about the tools that actually made the pictures. This part is shorter, and it’s less about code than about a decision I made along the way. The Kids Player has always been private — your family, your NAS, a password on every new device. So copyright wasn’t really the issue here? Right, and I should be clear about that up front. Because it’s a private, password-gated app for my own family, I could have reused existing footage — a frame grabbed from a video of the song — the same way I already do for the audio side of the library. Nothing about that would have been a legal problem for a personal app like this. ...
Part one was about why the song tab needed pictures at all. This part is about what I actually typed to get there — and why I didn’t know the answer myself before I typed it. You knew what you wanted. Why not just plan the build yourself first? Because I genuinely didn’t know how. I’m not a developer. I know what I want the result to feel like — my daughter looks at a picture, taps it, hears a song — but I have no instinct for how that should be structured underneath. So I stopped trying to design it and just described the situation to Claude instead, the way I’d describe it to another parent, not to an engineer. ...
I’m a 60-year-old dad with no coding background. Before I try a new tool, I usually spend a day just reading about it. I didn’t do that with Claude Code. I opened it and started building right away, adding small amounts of credit whenever I ran low. Add up all those small payments, and the first month cost about $75. Two Doors, and I Walked Through the Wrong One I didn’t know Anthropic has two completely separate ways to pay for Claude Code. ...
I want to say this plainly before I say anything else: Google’s engineers built Gemini Live Translate. Google published the starter code for it. I did not invent real-time speech translation. What I actually did is narrower, and honestly more interesting to write about: I took a script Google gives away for free and turned it into a service I could open from my own phone, on my own domain, before I had confirmed Google’s own consumer app was reliably doing the same thing for me here in Korea. ...
I use Claude Code every day on my main PC. It’s the tool I talk to when making apps for my family. It worked well without problems for several weeks. Then I wanted to use it on a second device. This is my daughter’s PC. Sometimes I work on her apps there. Same subscription, same account, everything was the same. I installed the VS Code extension and opened it. Then I saw this error: ...
I save every prompt I type when I’m building something. I started doing it long before this blog, for a dull reason: I forget what I did, and the log helps me pick things back up. Going back through one of those logs recently, I found a session worth sharing. It’s closer to what building with AI actually feels like than a clean demo is. The demos show you the good moment. You describe what you want, and a working app appears. That does happen, and it’s real. But most of the work isn’t that. A lot of it is more like this: a task that looked easy, and an AI that got it wrong a few times before we sorted it out. ...
Every time I type a prompt that actually matters — one that solved a real problem or unlocked something I didn’t know how to do — I prefix it with //. That double slash is a convention I made up. It tells my Claude Code hook: this one is worth keeping. The hook saves it to a file. Eventually I want those files to feed an app that writes blog drafts automatically. That is the plan for episode 20 of this series. ...
There is a 1974 German theology book that exists in almost no library. One copy lives with its owner here in Korea. He wanted it translated into Korean. I offered to help. First step: get it scanned properly. I visited a professional scanning company. They said the book needed to be taken apart — pages separated, binding cut — before they could run it through their equipment. I relayed this to the owner. He said: do not cut this book. The scanning company said: then we cannot help you. ...
You’ve probably felt this. Someone mentions a technology — Cloudflare Tunnel, RAG, Termux, vector search — and a small door closes in your head. “That sounds powerful,” you think, “but it’s not for me. I’m not an engineer.” For most of my life, that feeling was right. Knowing the name of a technology got you almost nowhere. Between the name and a working result there were months of study, and a level of skill I was never going to reach. ...