Holiday Hacks 🎄✨

I had some time over the Christmas period to play with Claude Code and the new Opus 4.5 model. I'll put aside my judgment and learnings here, and just document (perhaps to myself) my journey.

Art Walk Maps

Amy, my wife, runs Belltown Art Walk. It's quite an undertaking and it's become an important part of the culture of our downtown neighborhood. One of the things she does is keep track of which venues are on the map. Physical printed copies help some cohort of folks out a lot. It's not a huge ordeal, but I observed it being a little painful, and wrote up a thing to help.

In mid-summer of 2025, this required a lot of back and forth with Claude. In December, it was like, maybe five discussions. 👀

Multi-player, web-based dungeon crawler

One of my brothers reminded me a few days ago of one of Bungie's early games, Minotaur. It was a Mac-based game that used AppleTalk (!) to coordinate a live multiplayer session. It's a fun, quirky, and somewhat complex game. We had a ton of fun with it as kids.

It's hard to play it these days. First of all, you can't buy it. Second, if you do acquire it, it's hard to run. And it's harder still because of AppleTalk.

So I decided to see if I could get Claude Code to build it. It works, and it's live. I don't own the IP or anything, so we're just tinkering around with it.

A few interesting things:

• The game itself was eminently buildable by Claude. It understood the entire project and picked good frameworks.
• The sprites—the little images that make up the game—were stored in a clever way inside the old application's resources. Claude needed multiple attempts but eventually, in part by looking at the assembly in the old app, figured out how to reconstruct the sprites.
• The items have quirky behaviors, many of which introduce special states. For example, you can "trap" an item so another person gets injured if they pick it up. Claude made quick work of this, especially after it built a test harness for it.
• "We" built it as a Vercel app, but eventually separated it into a server and client architecture and deployed the server to Railway.
• Asking for cleaner architecture, and more comprehensive testing, worked.

Org simulator

I frequently will write in order to think about something. Walks are even better, but it's cold in December.

I was thinking about what it means for code authoring time to go so close to zero. I mean it practically feels like zero. So what does it mean? I had some priors but wanted to simulate it.

I worked with Claude conversationally to develop a simulation. We made a few together. Ultimately the most simple one is the one I felt I could understand. I still struggle with very complex simulations, but believe they can be super useful.

This was comically easy, by the way. The best thing to do here was to feed the model back to models and ask them to critique and explain them. I ended up doing that right in the page, too, with an LLM invocation in there.

CellarDoor: CellarTracker wrapper

For wine nerds like me, CellarTracker is the gold standard way to keep track of your wines, tasting notes, etc. It's a stalwart, been around for years... but like with many hobbies, people develop their own workflows. I built a wrapper for it.

• Google OAuth integration went smoothly, but the console is still clicky.
• I fed Claude some network transcripts (from Chrome) of me doing some actions on the site and it built a pretty good model of it. Adding a CellarTracker mock to the test suite helped, too.
• I actually ended up changing the site in real time while in the cellar doing some inventory work.

Social event site for a community

Someone in my network has a very interesting idea for a site to serve a community. She mentioned this to me while I was eating dinner at her bar, and I asked her to send me her mockups. The site works, again with Google Auth etc. Her immediate take was that she had no idea how this could come together so fast. My answer was that I didn't, really, either.