Build Log
Build logs, tutorials, and lessons learned.
Building a Pirate-Themed Barbershop Site, Mostly by Prompting Claude
A barber in Cove, Utah had an Instagram and no website. I gave Claude the right prompt, all the real details, and a styling direction, and it built the three files. The hard part was getting the content, not the code.
I'm Only Building Dead Simple Apps From Now On
I opened Bloons TD to play a quick round and closed it without playing. Four modals appeared before I could see the homescreen. From now on, my apps do one thing.
Building a Travel Power Adapter Tool with Claude in a Weekend
How I turned leftover destination data into a 221-country power adapter finder with plug types and voltage comparison. The first version was unusable.
Building a Layover Calculator That Knows Every Terminal at JFK
How I built a connection time calculator covering 70 airports with pairwise terminal transfers, customs buffers, and a five-factor assessment algorithm.
I Let Claude Design My Homepage Hero and Shipped What It Built
I gave Claude Design six 'decide for me' answers and it came back with a three-layer canvas flight animation. Two concepts, one conversation.
Building a Checked Bag Fee Calculator That Computes
Framework-free fee calculator widget. Overweight surcharges, third-bag estimates, 75+ airlines sorted by total cost, all inside an iframe.
I Built a Free Embeddable Carry-On Size Widget for Travel Blogs
A free, no-cookies carry-on size checker any travel blog can embed with a short HTML snippet. 75+ airlines, auto-updating data, full theme customization.
How to Set Up a Claude Code Statusline (Step-by-Step)
Set up a custom Claude Code statusline in 60 seconds with /statusline. Show your /usage, /context, 5-hour reset time, and working directory as colored progress.
I Built a Dead Simple App Because Claude Code Couldn't Hear Me
Claude Code on Bedrock doesn't expose a microphone. I type slowly. So I built an iOS app that transcribes speech and drops it straight to the clipboard.
Building the Carry-On and Personal Item Size Checkers
Two free tools that tell you whether your bag fits a given airline, built on a cited dataset of 50 carriers sourced from official policy pages.
I Built a Media Kit Generator Because a Creator Asked Me To
A content creator needed a media kit PDF. Every tool I found wanted a monthly subscription. So I built one that's free, no signup, and generates a polished.
I Built an API Cost Tracker and Then Couldn't Ship It
BurnRate was supposed to be a unified dashboard for Anthropic and OpenAI spend. It worked great, until I realized the keys it needed could do a lot more than.
I Built an SEO Scanner That Actually Checks if AI Can Find You
Lighthouse doesn't check if ChatGPT can crawl your site. So I built ShipReady, an SEO and AEO scanner that audits your site for the age of answer engines.
I Built an AI Trading Bot That Watches Trump's Truth Social Posts
I built a bot that reads Trump Truth Social posts and trades the market. Paper trading worked great. Real markets taught me that latency kills everything.
Building PackSmart: An AI Packing List With Weather
How I built a free AI-powered packing list tool as part of the Travel Vient travel ecosystem, and what I learned about wrangling LLM output into reliable JSON.
Building SumTrails: A Daily Number-Path Puzzle Game
I built a daily number-path puzzle game because I wanted one to play. Turns out, generating good puzzles is exponentially harder than solving them.
Moving a Client Site Off an AI Builder, Rebuilt From Scratch
LandingSite AI got Griffin Renovation online fast, but SEO limits and vendor lock-in pushed me to rebuild the whole thing in plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Building a Website for a 40-Year-Old Hair Salon
A local salon in Smithfield, Utah had been cutting hair for four decades without a website. Here's how I built one from scratch with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS.
Building Roamly: AI-Powered Group Travel Planning
How I turned the frustration of planning a trip with friends into a full-stack app that uses Claude AI to find destinations everyone can actually agree on.
I Built a Pipeline to Generate YouTube Shorts Programmatically
A TypeScript CLI that takes a script and spits out a finished YouTube Short using Claude, Fal.ai, ElevenLabs, and FFmpeg, no video editor required.
I Built a WoW Addon to Automate My Portal Business
How selling mage portals for gold in WoW Classic led to writing Lua, fighting the minimap API, and learning why Trade chat is a disaster for pattern matching.
I Built a Chrome Extension That Tells Jokes (4,600 People Use It)
How a simple joke extension became a TypeScript learning project, a monetization experiment, and somehow one of the more successful things I've shipped.
I Shipped a Client Site in an Afternoon Using an AI Builder
A renovation company needed a website fast. I used LandingSite.ai to go from nothing to live in a few hours, and here's what actually worked.
I Built Smoke or Fire: A React Native Card Game
How a party card game became a React Native + Firebase multiplayer app, the Firebase array normalization problem that almost broke multiplayer.
Frequently Asked Questions
What topics does the Vient build log cover?
The build log covers shipping indie software end to end: build logs from real apps and client websites, technical tutorials on web and mobile development, lessons learned from launching products, and deep dives into AI-assisted workflows for solo developers and small teams.
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New posts are published as we ship features, launch products, or discover techniques worth sharing. You can subscribe via RSS to get notified of every new post.