I’ve got kids and so seldom find myself with the time or energy to work on something. Cursor has really helped in that regard.
I have an extensive media collection of very large VR video files with very unhelpful names. I needed to figure out a good way to review which ones I wanted to keep and discard (over 30TB, almost 2000 files). It was fun sitting using Cursor with Claude to work on setting up a quick web UI, with calls out to ffmpeg to generate snapshots. It handled the “boring parts” with aplomb, getting me a html page with a little JavaScript to serve as my front end, and making a super simple API. All this was still like 1000 lines and would have taken me days, or I would have copied some boilerplate then modified it a little.
The problems Claude couldn’t figure out were also similarly interesting, like its syntax to the ffmpeg calls were wrong and not skipping all the frames we didn’t want to generate, so it was taking 100x longer to generate than was necessary seeking through every file, then I made some optimizations in how I had it configured, then realizing I’d generated thumbnails for 3 hours only for them to not display well on the page as it was an 8x1 tile.
At that point Claude wanted to regenerate all the thumbnails and I said “just display the image twice, with the first half displayed the first time and the second half displayed the second time, saving myself a few hours. Hacky, but for a personal project, the right solution.
I still felt like I was tinkering in a way I haven’t in awhile, and a project that I’d never have gotten around to and instead have just probably bought another new hard drive, took me a couple hours, most of which was actually marking the files as keep or delete. I ended up deleting 12TB of stuff I didn’t want, which it felt cool to write myself a bespoke tool rather than search around on the off chance that such a thing already exists.
It also gave me a mental framework of how to approach little products like this in the future, that often a web ui and a simple API backend like Node making external process calls is going to be easier than making a full fat windows UI.
I have a similarly sized STL library from 3D printing and think I could apply mostly the same idea to that, in fact it’s 99% the same except for swapping out the ffmpeg call to something to generate a snapshot of the stl at a few different angles.