One thing that I’ve found hard to relay is how much of a productivity multiplier Claude Code is when it comes to side-projects and prototypes.
I typically write side projects for myself. Which means that I typically only deploy locally. There’s a friction to doing side-projects from scratch though:
- it’s hard to get started on a project
- it’s hard to follow-through once the excitement wears off
- it’s hard to do the last 10% to wrap a project up.
With Claude Code, I’ve been able to get past those hurdles and work on so many more projects than I ever could in the past.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve shipped around 19 side projects using Claude Code and I honestly can’t believe the variety of stuff I ended up building. Rust TUIs, Go TUIs, browser games, a 3D RPG, financial dashboards, a component library, CLI tools – pretty much anything that crossed my mind got built.
I’ve always had a massive backlog of project ideas. I think every developer does. But the gap between “I want to build this” and “I have the time and energy to actually do it” has always been enormous.
Note: I work so much in the terminal (and always have) that TUIs are my natural inclination for projects. It’s much easier for me to spin up a TUI in a new terminal tab in Kitty or inside a TMUX session (I use both together) than having an electron app or a web app.
Start TUI
A terminal start menu built in Rust with ratatui. Ranger-style three-column layout, vim-style navigation, auto-categorization of tools, and a built-in database of 134 CLI apps. My point was to have a “start menu” for my CLI since that’s where I live. Now I do and I use this TUI to add my other TUIs to it.
Boil TUI
A terminal game library manager in Go with Bubbletea. It’s basically Steam for your terminal games – auto-discovers CLI games installed on your system and gives you a TUI to browse and launch them. I love to play CLI-based games and always had a hard time remembering everything I had installed.
Media Picker
Also Go/Bubbletea. A cable TV guide TUI that mimics the classic Comcast channel guide. I typically try to keep up with multiple shows across multiple services but always forget what shows I was recently watching. Same thing for video games. So I built this TUI that fetches info from OMdb for tv shows and movies and then a python script creates random channels and creates a schedule. I’ve been messing around with it to create marathons and events but it’s not there yet.
3D Fantasy RPG
I built this 3D fantasy RPG with one of my kids. It was a fantastic experience in many ways. We added a ton of features:
- wave system
- random item/buff/boosts drops from monsters
- 3D environment
- shops
- special “galaxy” mode where it’s nighttime and different monsters come out
- a “mech” mode where you enter a mech and fight in it
And tons more. The problem has been that claude code runs into issues, breaks things, and can only go so far. We found a point where CC could no longer add new features without breaking the basics and new features were always buggy. Fun project though.
Fishing Game
This was another experiment with one of my kids. We built a fishing game together based on Cat Goes Fishing. It ended up being really fun. We asked Claude to build everything into a single .html file and it was able to do so very well!
It was a bit of a surprise because I already had two failed gaming projects where claude couldn’t really accomplish its job; however, it worked out for this game.
Todos
Just a simple CLI todo manager that utilizes markdown files for storage. I’ve been wanting to create one of these for a very long time – to have a quickly-accessible todo manager.
The kicker here is that this todos app can work via a TUI or simple commands. I built a SKILL.md around those commands which allows my claude instance to check and update todos based on what project they’re in.
Banner Maker
I’ve always made my banners from scratch for my articles like my demystifying tools series. It got a little annoying because all I needed to do was show:
- actual tool output in the background
- have a nice border
- article name in the front
So, I decided to vibe code this process and I’m very happy with the results.
Photo Importer
I used to use the Microsoft Windows photo import to create a solid structure for archiving photos. It was pretty simple, each photo was moved into its appropriate folder by year, month, and date. However, this functionality had its own issues and I couldn’t resort the photos.
A while back, I created a script to do this organization for me and with Claude, I improved the script to support video sorting and I built a TUI around it.
Skillbox
When I saw the proliferation of SKILLs for Claude Code, I decided to start putting my own personal prompts and utility prompts into its own repo and repackaging them as SKILLs. This is the final result that I keep adding to as I find more utilities worth adding. Easily installable via npx skills add antjanus/skillbox.
Agent Compiler
I had this idea to allow embedding skills into a CLAUDE.md file so that claude has a much higher chance of picking them up to use. SKILLs can obviously bloat the file size; however, it’s a solid solution for often-used skills that you may want to always have at hand.
Agent IPC
Before Claude launched its teams for claude code, I started building an IPC protocol for inter-agent communication. It allowed me to run one claude instance in a repo and communicate with another claude instance in another repo. It was actually a great idea (in my opinion):
- a claude code session could join a “channel” where N number of sessions could chat
- claude code could tail the conversation and append to a markdown file to chat with another instance
- a user could join the channel using a CLI to chat with both
Interactive Learning App
One promise of LLMs has been the ability to learn what you want to learn HOW you want to learn it. That promise, for me, has gone largely unfulfilled. However, I’ve been able to work out a great way for Claude Code to do research so I decided to create an app that’s interactive and can teach me anything.
A Next.js learning platform with quizzes, code challenges, Mermaid diagrams, and progress tracking. Runs Python in the browser via Pyodide and JavaScript via Sandpack. Content is all JSON-driven with discriminated union types for different block types – text, code, diagrams, callouts, comparisons, fill-in-the-blank.
I created both an app and a skill to help me learn and generate learning material.
Cottage UI
A React component library built alongside a YouTube tutorial series. I started the project with the intention of writing the best, cleanest, reusable, well-tested code. It was supposed to be the pinnacle of how I’d like to write UI libraries. I managed to build the whole build/deployment chain and a single component.
With CC, I was able to build out the rest of the library fast, efficiently, and correctly according to my vision.
Dashboard
A work productivity dashboard pulling in GitHub PRs, local git repo status, Jira tasks, and an AI chat interface that works with both Claude and local Ollama models. React frontend, Fastify backend, Docker deployment, SSE for real-time updates. Drag-and-resize widget layout with saveable presets. The kind of internal tool I’ve wanted to build for years.
Content Creation
A content management suite with two implementations – a CLI/full-stack version and a client-only web version. Hub-and-spoke content strategy for AI/tech content. Built it, realized I wanted a different interface, built it again. Because I could.
Models
Documentation repo for my local Ollama models – Qwen3-Coder, GLM-4.7-Flash, Llama 3.2. API examples in curl, Python, and JavaScript. Model selection guide. Not code, just a personal reference I keep around.
Blog 2024
This blog. The one you’re reading. SvelteKit, MDSvex, TailwindCSS. Articles auto-discovered from the filesystem, content negotiation so you can curl any article as raw markdown. Built and maintained with Claude Code.
Personal Blog
Another blog, built with Astro 5.7. Just to see how the other side lives. TailwindCSS typography, MDX content collections. I like having options.
Do you like the TUI recordings in this repo? I created a SKILL for generating these using the VHS utility.
