A birthday gift for my twin nieces, built on a Raspberry Pi. The governing design principle: every button does something, and none of them are destructive — a five-year-old can mash buttons and discover what happens. You navigate photos with an Xbox controller, rotate them, add frames and stickers (unicorns, stars, the works), and one button is dedicated entirely to silly sound effects.
It started when my brother suggested a digital picture frame so the girls could see photos from their new cameras on the big screen. Most of the frames I found were boring, expensive, or subscription-bound, and I wanted something that felt more like an arcade game — interactive, playful, theirs. I'd pictured a full arcade cabinet, but with only a couple of weeks to work I scoped it down to a web app running in kiosk mode, driven by a gamepad. Claude Code handled most of the implementation; my role was often reduced to offering encouragement. The whole build took about as long as watching the Godfather trilogy — not counting a two-hour detour troubleshooting SSH that ended with Claude suggesting I go to bed.
The ease of it convinced me that a lot of what we now call "software" will soon be conjured up on the spot — built as a hobby, or even as a gift for one person.
The source is on GitHub.