Field Notes

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. ...

TransLee could already do two separate things well: catch sound from a phone’s own speaker and translate it, or listen to a person talking and speak a translation back. What it couldn’t do was the thing I actually needed for a real meeting: sit in an English-language call as the only Korean speaker, show me Korean for everything everyone else says, and speak English out loud when it’s my turn, without me touching a language dropdown mid-conversation. ...

Late on July 13, TransLee could hear a quiet news broadcast through my phone’s own speaker and translate it live. By the next morning, that exact feature was silent. Nothing had touched the speaker-recognition code overnight. What had changed was a different feature entirely: translated voice playback had just started working for the first time. The Symptoms, in Order 03:40 — Speaker-sound recognition, which worked the night before, stopped picking up anything. 04:36 — Still broken. YouTube audio wasn’t recognized at all, and even the transcript-only fallback wasn’t translating, just showing raw text. 07:41 — Fixed the transcript-and-translation display. Recognition worked again. But the voice-playback feature, the one that had worked the previous evening, was now silent. 07:46 to 08:13 — Every attempt to get both working at once produced the same shape of failure: one sentence would translate and play correctly, then everything stopped, no more translation, no more transcript, sometimes a garbled half-second of audio right before it died. Five hours of this, with the failure mode staying identical no matter which side I patched. That repetition was the actual clue. This wasn’t a bug hiding somewhere in the code. It was two features fighting over the same microphone. ...