Certain side projects and ideas have been in the back of my mind for years. And I wonder which ones have been there the longest.
Some of these ideas involve daily utilities that facilitate digital workflows—think invoice archiving or sketch editing and organization—that could potentially be improved. Others involve enhancements or additions to my websites—component ideas, style changes, and a long etcetera of possibilities.
AI-assisted coding makes this easier than ever. You can fan out an agent on the side and let it think through a problem, proposing solutions and even coming up with prototype code. You steer it in different directions, and when you're happy, you can ask it to implement the features for real.
One of the longest habits I've followed is expense-tracking in plain text, which is a great resource by itself. Yet
For personal projects and utilities, there's no need to worry much about code quality or security. It's not that you're going to put that in the hands of dozens or thousands of people. They're for you to use, or for others to access (in the case of websites).
So I asked Claude Code.
Analyze the expense-tracking format of expensed.md and come up with app ideas to (a) author/edit these files, e.g., adding new expenses, editing, removing, (b) querying them, e.g., search, filtering, summaries, daily/monthly/yearly sums, etc., and (c) visualizing, interacting/navigating data. Your proposals could be in the form of CLI tools, web apps, iOS apps, and other mediums/formats you come up with.
Good — I have a solid understanding of the format. Here's my analysis and proposals.
Sonnet 4.6 understood everything pretty well in one shot.
The Format
<amount><currency>[/N or ×N] [(of <full>)] #category @vendor [description] [#tag…]
Key elements:
- Amount + currency: 130€, $6.00, 5.20€ — mixed EUR/USD
- Split modifier: /2 = shared cost (you paid half), ×2 = you paid for two
- Partial payment: (of 159) = you paid 9 out of 159 total
- Category: #food, #home, #web, #transport, #care, #gift, #tech, #travel, #software, #leisure, #sport, #work, #clothes, #games, #fees, #lost
- Vendor: @amazon, @spotify, @repsol, etc.
- Description: free-form text after vendor
- Tags: #monthly, #yearly — ad-hoc event/project markers
Then it came up with these potential apps, with finer detail I'm omitting here.