Show HN: Vibe coding a bookshelf with Claude Code

This is lovely, claude code is a great tool for creating software for a user of 1. Personal software that runs locally (or on your own website in your case) and works exactly you want without it doing anything you don't want.

One-off scripts and single page html/css/js apps that run locally are fantastically accessible now too.

As someone who doesn't code for a living, but can write code, I would often go on hours/day long side quests writing these kind of apps for work and for my personal life. I know the structure and architecture but lack the fluency for speedy execution since I'm not writing code everyday. Claude code fills that speed gap and turned my days/hours long side quests into minutes for trivial stuff, and hours for genuinely powerful stuff at home and at work.

These are the perfect size projects vibe coding is currently good for.

At some point you hit a project size that is too large or has too many interdependencies, and you have to be very careful about how you manage the context and should expect the llm to start generating too much code or subtle bugs.

Once you hit that size, in my opinion, it's usually best to drop back to brainstorming mode, only use the llm to help you with the design, and either write the code yourself, or write the skeleton of the code yourself and have the llm fill it in.

With too much code, llms just don't seem able yet to only add a few more lines of code, make use of existing code, or be clever and replace a few lines of code with a few more lines of code. They nearly always will add a bunch of new abstractions.

This nails what vibe coding actually is. The model handles execution, but intent and taste stay human. That’s where the real leverage is.

Great project!

Vibe coding has really helped me explore skills outside of my comfort zone which can then be applied in combination with other existing skills or interests in new ways.

In the case of your project, I imagine that now that you can gather data such as books from an image of a bookshelf, you can do something similar in infinite other ways.

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