For Christmas, I got my five-year-old nieces some cheap digital cameras from Walmart. For their birthdays a few weeks later, my brother suggested getting them a digital picture frame so they could see their photos on a "big screen."

I wasn’t too happy with the digital picture frames I found: cloud subscriptions, overpriced, boring.

I started imagining something that would be…fun! It would look more like an arcade game and give some control back to the girls – let them play with the photos instead of just watching them scroll by.

I only had a couple weeks, so I knew my full vision of a handcrafted arcade cabinet was too ambitious. But stripped to its core, it was really just a web app. A brainstorming session with Claude gave me the idea to use a video game controller instead of building a full arcade cabinet, backed by a Raspberry Pi hooked up to the TV.

I put together a plan. The app should run in kiosk mode. Every button on the controller should do something and none of them should be destructive. I mapped out the controls – forward/back, rotate, add a frame, add/move stickers, one button just for silly sound effects.

I started on this in December, just after Opus 4.5 was released. I was pretty amazed how easily the project came together. A year and a half ago I took a week to give myself a crash course in JavaScript so I could build simple apps – now, once we got the roadmap nailed down my role was often reduced to giving Claude encouragement.

There was one place Claude got bogged down – Linux system administration. We spent two hours one night troubleshooting an intermittently flaky SSH connection, leading Claude to finally suggest I go to bed. Excluding that detour, we built this whole app in about the same time as it takes to watch the Godfather trilogy. At each step, I felt Claude was faithfully executing the plan and adding its own level of polish, a feeling eerily similar to collaborating with software engineers at work.

The ease of developing this project convinced me that a lot of what we think of as software will be easily conjured up on the spot in the future. And now it’s possible to build a polished software app as a hobby, and even as a gift for one person.

Our dog sitter just retired, and when I asked her what she plans to do with her time she told me about her quilting hobby. It sounded like a perfect hobby – creative, social (but also able to be pursued alone) and with an output suitable for gifting or even selling. I felt echoes of quilting in building this gift for my nieces. Will we start to see artisanal software pop up on Etsy? People sharing small personal software projects in local art galleries or evening meetups?

I dubbed this project “Photostation,” and I’ll give it to my nieces in a few days. I bet they’ll be excited to see their photos on the big screen, have fun putting unicorn stickers in the bushes and stars over their dog’s eyes. We’ll laugh when they discover the fart sound effect. But most of all, I hope that they'll have an idea for something else they want it to do, and we can build the next version together.