Projects.
A handful of small apps I built for my kids, friends and me — each one a hands-off experiment in how far Claude Code can go on its own.
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Jul 2026
CarCalc
This one started as a chat at football practice. Brad, one of the other dads, was in the market for an electric car — and kept hitting calculator sites that wanted his email before they'd tell him anything, just so they could spam him later. We got talking about how genuinely confusing the finance side of it is: the fringe-benefits-tax changes, and which way of paying — a novated lease, a car loan, or cash — actually gets you the most car for your budget. It seemed like a fun problem, so I built an app that handles both the funding side and the car-selection side in one place. You tell it what you earn and what you want in a car, set a monthly budget, and it works out how much car each funding method reaches — with the novated-lease line flattening dead at the $91,661 FBT threshold — then shows you five real EVs around that ceiling, each costed three ways, with running costs, insurance and resale baked in. Every rate is editable and sourced, nothing calls a model, and it never asks for your email.
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Jul 2026
SongCoach
An app to help my son and me get better at drums. We wanted to play along to songs we actually like — but to learn a part properly you need to hear the drummer, and once you can play it, their drums fight with yours. So SongCoach takes any song playing on your Mac — a YouTube tab, Spotify, a file — captures the system audio, and runs an AI source-separation model (Demucs) to split it into three stems: the full song, drums only, and the song with the drums removed. Then it opens a player with three synced waveforms, solo switching, A–B looping, and a pitch-preserved slow-down, so you can drill four bars until they're yours. Everything runs locally — no account, no cloud, nothing uploaded. It was my chance to learn how to embed an AI model inside an app, and to build and package a proper desktop app again — something I hadn't done in a long time. It ships as a signed, notarized macOS app.
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Jun 2026
DrumCoach
I've been learning the drums with my son this year, and we both struggle with timing — so I built an app that listens to us play and coaches it. The goal was something that just works on any phone or laptop, no specialist audio gear: you play near the mic and DrumCoach detects and classifies each hit, notates it on a live drum staff, and measures your timing with feedback ranges tuned to your level. It was great to work with high- and low-pass filters, Fourier transforms, and spectral centroids again — DSP concepts I hadn't touched since my computer-engineering classes. I also got to play with Firestore as a backing store, syncing practice data across devices tied to a real Google identity.
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May 2026
Spell to Fly
A geography-and-spelling game, and my excuse to work with maps again. I've loved mapping software ever since my Nokia days in Berlin working on Ovi Maps (2009–2010), so I put Claude to the test on map data, pathfinding, and spoken audio. You fly across a region — Europe, Africa, Asia, or the Americas — hopping from city to city by spelling each country and city name hangman-style, guided by text-to-speech pronunciation. Only the territory bordering you is revealed, so you're navigating a hidden graph toward a ticketed destination. I built it to help my kids learn geography and improve their spelling together. Getting the viewport and zoom behaviour right was genuinely hard to do with AI. Something like this would have taken me weeks of full-time work back in Berlin, but this time I had it running in two weekends.
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May 2026
MathGrid
A real-time multiplayer arithmetic game, and my go at a more ambitious hands-off Claude Code build. It started as a paper card game I made for my kids a year ago; this digital version lets 2+ players race on a shared 6×6 grid to find three numbers in a line that satisfy a target formula. I built it partly to sharpen my kids' mental arithmetic and partly so my wife and I could play against them across our own devices. There's a gentler No Multiplication mode for younger players, room codes to join a game, and a leaderboard. The real-time coordination runs on Rails' Action Cable (via Turbo Streams + Redis) — and I made a point of getting it all running on a minimum Heroku spec.
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May 2026
Spelling Bee
A hands-off experiment in AI-only coding: I let Claude Code build the whole thing to see how it handles animation, game rules, DB schema design, and deployment. It's a small spelling game aimed at kids aged 6–10, where an animated bee fills in with each wrong guess. There's a typed Classic mode and a spoken Voice mode — the latter added to mirror the way my own kids were learning their spelling out loud in school. Words come from the Oxford 3000 (with auto-fetched definitions), and scores land on a leaderboard.