AI Accelerated My Side Projects

I'm going all in on building side projects with agentic engineering and vibe coding. My specific stack is Claude Sonnet 5 on automatic mode in VS Code.

I still can't trust AI to give me the right answers to specific questions because it still hallucinates so much, but I feel that it's gotten pretty good at coding. Not good enough that I will allow PRs to be merged without my review, however. The reason I can't trust its answers to questions is that when I ask it questions about things, like how to brew a certain coffee, the system will sometimes give me answers that I know are wrong.

For example, I was using my own Claude coffee shop overview system to give an overview of a coffee shop. Claude would create recommendations for drinks to try at each coffee shop. Unfortunately, Claude was hallucinating by making up drinks that didn't exist. Hallucinations are still very real. This happens in code too - that's why I always PR any changes that I'm pushing that were created with AI.

Over the last six months, I've really seen a leap in the quality of software that Claude can produce. It's gotten very good at taking English language instructions and turning them into working software. So much so that I've switched from having it ask me permission before it edits files to letting the system automatically update on its own. Now that I'm trusting the agent more, I've been publishing the backlog of side projects I've had at an amazing pace.

Since AI has taken off, AI-developed apps have flooded the app stores. This is leading people to question whether we are more productive because of AI or if we are just creating more stuff. Matt Scherer wrote an excellent post called The AI Productivity Illusion where he discusses the difference between the quantity and quality of apps created due to the AI boom. He also points out that productivity means something different to different people. To me, I'm more productive thanks to AI. I can build more products faster and get more work done for my clients. That's productivity to me.

These are the side projects that I've been able to build and ship since going all in on AI this year:

My personal site: When I first started this website, it was a simple site that read markdown files for blog posts. With the help of AI I was able to implement a full database backed CMS system complete with admin interface in a matter of an hour - complete with a full migration of all the previous years' markdown blog posts into a new blog post table in the local SQLite database. I added an admin backend section that lets me draft, save, preview and publish blog and photoblog posts.

What started as a simple static website with a static blog generator is turning into a full-fledged CMS product. Down the road, I hope to be able to package this up into a turnkey solution for others who want a home-grown website/blogging system without having to know anything technical. But that's down the road.

Some other items that I vibe coded for the site are:

Current temperature for Minneapolis-St. Paul in the header.

Updated the style from standard Bootstrap to something more personal and aesthetically pleasing.

Added a ticker cmd window to the home page that pulls data from my /Now page and displays quick information about what I'm currently working on.

Gave the website a full IndieWeb audit. Updating the content and structure to follow IndieWeb standards.

A few times I left my browser open for longer than the session, and after coming back to publish blog changes, the site redirected to the authentication page and I lost all my work. I worked with Claude, and in 10 mins I had this problem solved and a fix pushed out to the server.

My Photoblog: After seeing a big comeback in photoblogs and being inspired by so many other photoblogs out there, I decided that I wanted my own as well. I don't like that Instagram is jamming video and ads down my throat every time that I open the platform. It doesn't feel like a place where you can appreciate other photographers' work any longer. That's unfortunate, but it's encouraging to see all these new photoblogs popping up across the internet. Right now is a good time to be a photoblogger, I think.

The photoblog right now is actually part of the main ClintMcMahon.com website. I was able to use AI to create a separate routing system and .NET page template so that anything coming into photos.clintmcmahon.com gets routed to the photoblog page template versus rendering the existing web page templates that the rest of the site is using.

I spent an afternoon describing to Claude the type of photoblog that I wanted to create and how I wanted the architecture to be set up. Minimal, mostly white, and the image should be front and center. I'd say the final product is pretty close to what I had in mind.

The photoblog has full Mastodon integration as well. When I post a new photo — or blog from the main site — the content gets posted to my Mastodon account with a link back to the detail page. Then on the detail page you can see the activity that happens from Mastodon - likes, replies, etc.

This was also a website that started off as static markdown files. But after a while I wanted to start posting from my browser, as firing up VS Code every time I wanted to post a photo was becoming a burden. I instructed Claude to create a system for the photoblog that would make posting images and text as easy as if I were using a native social media app. But for the browser and not a native app.

My plans for this website are to eventually break the code off into its own repository so that others can download and run their own photoblogs easily using this software.

Undercurrent.FM: A website that tracks the number of times a song has been played on 89.3 The Current. I've always wanted to see what the top tracks are that the station is playing, as well as what the trends are in current indie pop music. I'm a dedicated listener to KEXP in Seattle, where there used to be a KEXP version of what I've built here. That site is no longer up, and I hope to soon be able to recreate the site based on what I've got with The Undercurrent.

Utilizing the public API for The Current's playlist going back to January 2005, the website has a full search capabitliy of every artist and track that has ever been played on The Current - that's over two million plays. Some lists that I've created are:

Top songs this week

New to Rotation

Trending this month

On this day

Top songs & artists over 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, 1 year and all time

Unique songs played per year - this one is the most popular

Today's Record High: This is a website that hits the ThreadEx station data from the RCC ACIS NOAA web service to return the record high temperature, record low temperature, normal temps and other record weather data for a specific date and time of year. I built this application because I wanted to see how hot it has been getting and how the current records that are being set (or near records) compare to previous years.

This application tracks trends and things like heat waves. If you think a certain day is hot, you can look up the date and see how it compares to previous years. There are also bar charts and other graph elements that show the progression of heat and hot days over the centuries. There is definitely an upward trend in heat and dryness in Minnesota. Not that we needed a computer to tell us that.

MN Coffee Map: The MN Coffee Map is a website and mobile application that shows me my favorite coffee shops that are closest to me anywhere around the state of Minnesota. It's a coffee shop locator for good coffee in Minnesota. It includes reviews, maps, hours and directions. The idea for this application was that if I want to get a good coffee — third wave roaster, cortado or specialty drink — I would just open the app to find the closest one.

Using Google or Yelp would return coffee shops that I know don't fit what I'm looking for, so I needed a way to filter out the other coffee shops and just show the shops that I know are going to be great. I included Google's AI overview and review summaries in the app so users can get an idea of what the coffee shop is about before they visit.

So that is the collection of current side projects that I've got going on thanks to Claude and agentic development. I've got a lot more ideas rumbling around in my head, so I'm excited to see about turning them into products as well as building a regular cadence to update and produce more features in the existing side projects that I have going.