I use AI extensively for my work on Automattic’s mobile apps, and I feel my productivity has skyrocketed as a result, but I hadn’t used AI to create new products. That changed when I decided to spend a week-ish alongside my normal job to use AI to create a new product every day. Here’s what I came up with.
Cartoonousel
In a previous life I was a cartoonist and I thought it would be nice to create an app to showcase my old cartoons. I had a solid idea of what I wanted: a carousel of cartoons on a black-and-white ink splat background. I gave Claude specific instructions and it created exactly what I wanted.
The most interesting part of this was this app was created for macOS – and I’m not a macOS developer. I work primarily on Android yet with my guidance AI was able to create an app for a platform I have no experience with.
PianoScribe
In my spare time I enjoy playing piano, and have written a number of songs (my favorite is this one). It always bothered me that while I have audio recordings of my music, I never had transcriptions. So I created another macOS app which generates sheet music from an audio file.
Tic-Tac-Troll
A little while back I had an idea for an Android game in which you play tic-tac-toe with trolls. I used Adobe Firefly to create the graphics, Gemini for the background music, and Claude for the coding. I thought it would be interesting to have AI generate an iOS port of the app, and it did so flawlessly.
Snap-to-Site
This Android app didn’t turn out as I’d hoped but it was a fun experiment. It enables creating a WordPress site from your phone using the camera to showcase various aspects of your business.
WPFolio
This was my favorite creation. I’ve long worked on reading apps – I created the RSS reader FeedDemon over two decades ago, and when I joined Automattic my first task was creating the Android Reader for the WordPress app.
Every few years the idea of making our Reader a standalone app comes up, so I decided to give it a try. I used Claude Design to come up with a modern reading UI then used Claude Code to create the actual app – again, following my detailed instructions. I was very pleased with the end result.
Bonus: MemoryMap
This app was more of a brief flirt – there are other apps that already do this – but I thought it would be a nice experiment. It accesses your on-device Google Photos and shows you all the places you’ve been in a certain timeframe.