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. ...
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. ...
I did this once already for audio. Transcripts turned hundreds of hours of recordings into something you could search — type a phrase, jump straight to the moment. This time the black box wasn’t audio. It was paper. The Need: A Book You Can’t Search We have a set of printed booklets — a sermon series, scanned page by page from the original book. The content is good. The problem is the same problem the audio had before transcription: you remember there’s a page about a certain verse, but not which of the hundred-plus pages it’s on. A scanned book is just a folder of JPGs. You can look at every page, one at a time, or you can give up and guess. ...
My daughter got a new set of picture books. Each book came with an audio story and a short song. You had to use a code printed inside the book to unlock them. I have made something similar for her Kids Player three times before. This was the fourth time. It was also the fastest so far. And it had one new, unexpected twist. What I Needed: A New Bookshelf, The Same Old Problems The rest of my daughter’s Kids Player already works the way I want it to: You tap a cover to hear a story. There is no autoplay. There are no algorithms. Nothing plays that she did not choose. This new set of picture books deserved the same treatment. But on the vendor’s own web page, everything was set to video by default. Some of it was okay. It was not what I wanted for everything. ...
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 two covered the tool Claude and I built to manage lyrics and images per song. This part is about the actual picture-making — which took more trial and error than the tool itself did. You’d never really used AI image generators before this. What changed? Nothing had needed one. I’d poked at a couple out of curiosity, the way most people have, but nothing in my daily life depended on a generated image. Once I decided the song tab genuinely needed one picture per song — good enough that my daughter would want to look at it — that curiosity turned into something I had to get right. ...
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. ...