Build Your Own Tools

CLIs are really powerful for prototyping something that you want to dogfood and test yourself. Especially with tools like Claude Code, you can really test your own limits on the projects you can create. The key is to look at your own problems in your life (unless you are perfect, in that case congrats dawg!) and see what tools you wished existed to help you out. The sky is really the limit here in terms of potential.

For instance, my wife and I recently had our first baby last year in October. He is a little bundle of joy and we of course want him to get really good sleep, so that we can get really good sleep. We started playing white noise from our phones but we soon realized that with AirPlay we were limited to only playing white noise. Forever… or at least until he woke up. This meant no meaningless doomscrolling on Instagram, and who could possibly live without that?

Well, instead of accepting defeat, I thought how hard could it be and dove into solving the problem (with the help of Claude of course). Two hackathon days later and I now have a full homelab setup with a Raspberry Pi 5 that together with a progressive web app we can trigger white noise from anywhere. My wife sends me new feature requests too about sleep timers, automating it together with the lights, etc. And I think this is fun too!

We are living in an exciting time for makers and creators, but also a scary time. I think a way to cope with the scary is to use the tools at hand and see what comes out at the end. You might learn a thing or two!

Here is a link to the white noise caster if you are curious about how I did it.