I needed a way to test a short-form video idea for my demotivational speaker alter-ego, Desmond Vance, without sitting in front of a camera every time I had a thought.

The plan was simple:

• Train a custom avatar in Gemini that matches Desmond’s look and voice.
• Generate short 10-second clips on demand.
• Drop the MP4s into Canva to add text overlays.
• Slap a badge over the Gemini watermark in the corner.

I wanted a zero-friction pipeline. I wanted to go from an idea in my head to a published TikTok in five minutes flat.

The Toolkit

• Gemini (Custom Avatars): Clones the look and voice from a source calibration video and generates new 10-second clips.
• Canva: Handles the vertical 9:16 layout, text formatting, and graphic overlays.
• TikTok: The destination for publishing and watching the numbers.

Here is how we set up the assembly line:

The Strategy / The Build

• Training the custom avatar
  • I dressed up as Desmond Vance:
    • Cheap wig
    • Reading glasses
    • Ugly tie
    • Dress shirt and suit jacket
  • I ran through Gemini’s avatar creation process.
  • I recorded the setup video directly in the tool, moving my head side to side and reading out the prompt numbers on screen so it could lock down my facial geometry and voice tone.
• Generating the clips
  • Once the avatar was ready, Gemini had Desmond’s look and voice saved.
  • I started generating 10-second clips by giving it simple visual actions:
    • Staring blankly at a desk
    • Looking unimpressed in an office
    • Walking through an empty hallway
• Polishing in Canva
  • I downloaded the raw 10-second MP4 and dropped it into a blank 9:16 vertical Canva canvas.
  • I set the video as the background.
  • I created a circular headshot badge and positioned it in the bottom corner right over the Gemini watermark.
  • I added bold, centered text across the top with Desmond’s quotes (“Master the Minimum,” “Lower Your Expectations”).

The Roadblocks

• Viewer distraction from the watermark
  • Big tool watermarks in the corner pull eyes away from the clip. I’m not trying to hide that it’s AI—hence writing a whole post about it—I just don’t want people tuning out or getting disconnected from the joke because a software logo is flashing in the corner.
  • The Fix: I made the circular headshot badge in Canva slightly larger than necessary so it comfortably covers the entire corner, keeping the viewer’s focus on Desmond and the punchline.

The Finished Project

The pipeline works. I went from dressing up once in front of my webcam to pumping out multiple TikTok clips without putting the suit back on.

You can see the final Desmond Vance videos live on TikTok:

The Verdict:

I no longer have to set up lights or hit record for every new clip.

I no longer have to open a real video editor just to add text to a 10-second video.

I no longer want to pull my hair out over video production.

Once the template is saved in Canva, shipping a new clip takes under five minutes.

Read more at Build and Bail

The requirements were simple but specific:

• A front page showing overall leaders, split into Men’s and Women’s brackets.
• Clickable sections for individual events (like “Plank Hold” or “Golf Putting”) showing the rules and the current standings.
• A custom point system where 1st place gets 9 points, 2nd gets 7, down to 10th place.
• A hidden admin dashboard where we can add events, enter people’s scores, and let the app automatically calculate who is winning.

The Toolkit

You don’t need to know how to code to build something like this anymore, but you do need to know what tools to tell the AI to use. Here is the basic setup:

• The Brain: Claude Code (an AI that runs on your computer and writes the files for you).
• The Frontend: Next.js and Tailwind (this just means a modern website that looks clean and works fast).
• The Database: Supabase (a free, easy-to-use place to save all our entrants and scores).
• The Hosting: Cloudflare (to put the site on the internet for free).

The Secret Sauce: How to Actually Manage the AI

If you are trying to get an app out of your head and onto the screen, do not write one giant prompt asking the AI to build the whole thing.

If you ask for the whole house at once, the AI will build something that looks like a house, but when you open the front door, the plumbing is connected to the ceiling fan. By the time you notice, it’s too tangled to fix.

Instead, I used a strict checkpoint system. I gave Claude a master to-do list and forced it to stop after every single step so I could verify it worked.

• Step 1: Build the database tables. (Stop and let me check).
• Step 2: Write the math logic that calculates ties and assigns points. (Stop and let me run a test).
• Step 3: Build the public homepage with dummy data. (Stop and let me look at it).
• Step 4: Build the password screen for the admin area. (Stop and let me try logging in).
• Step 5: Build the forms to enter real scores. (Stop and let me try it).

Because I tested step 2 before step 3 was ever written, I knew the math was bulletproof before the AI started building pages that relied on it. This is the secret to rapid prototyping with AI.

The Snag: Getting it on the Internet

The only real headache we hit was when it was time to put the site live on Cloudflare.

• Claude initially tried to use an outdated deployment method.
• It caused the “backend” of our site (the part that saves the scores and checks the passwords) to crash because it was trying to run on the wrong type of engine.
• The fix: I told Claude to rip out the old method and use the modern Cloudflare adapter (OpenNext).

Once we made that swap, the site immediately worked online exactly how it worked on my computer. Note for builders: Always use the “preview” command to test how your site runs on the internet before actually publishing it.

The Finished Project

The final site is live right now at www.awesomeofficegames.com.

It’s fast, minimal, and does exactly what it needs to do. Because we built it in clean, logical chunks, it was incredibly easy to go back at the end and ask Claude to add a few polish features, like a navigation bar for the admin area and the ability to fix typos in people’s names without breaking the leaderboards.

If you’ve got an idea in your head, the tools are ready. Just remember to steer the ship one checkpoint at a time.

Read more at Build and Bail

Published: June 16, 2026 · Read time: 5 min · Series: Two Free Tuesday

A small note before we start

Normally the format is one real business idea and one absurd one. This week, both are technically real. The first one would clearly print money. The second one would also probably print money — but the premise is dumb, which restores balance. Absurd-first returns next week.

Two ideas. Both come with the planning prompt I’d use to build them. Pick one and ship it.

What is Two Free Tuesday?

Every Tuesday I drop two business ideas I’d hand to someone and say “go build this.” These are ideas I’m specifically not building — because I already have too many projects running, or because the audience for them isn’t my audience.

Each Tuesday post includes:

• The pitch
• Who it’s for
• The stack I’d use
• Weekend-build estimate
• How to monetize it
• Why I’m not building it
• A DIY path and a “have me build it” path
• The exact prompt I’d use in Claude to plan the whole build (free, drop your email in the block after each idea)

Idea 1: RecipeReplace

One-liner: Paste any recipe, get back the same recipe rewritten to work without whatever you don’t have, can’t use, or won’t use.

Who it’s for

• Home cooks with allergies (nut-free, dairy-free, gluten-free households)
• Parents with picky eaters who reject specific ingredients
• People who hate driving to the store mid-recipe to grab one missing thing
• Anyone running a low-stocked pantry who wants to actually use what’s there

How it works

• User pastes a recipe — copy/paste from any blog or cookbook
• User selects or types restrictions: “no eggs,” “no dairy,” “no garlic,” “no nuts”
• AI rewrites the recipe with real substitutions, adjusted measurements, and updated instructions
• Output is the full recipe in the same format — not a list of suggested swaps for the user to apply themselves
• User can save the rewritten recipe to their account for later

Suggested stack

• Next.js 14 (App Router) + Tailwind + TypeScript
• Supabase for auth and saved recipe history
• OpenAI or Anthropic API for the rewrite logic
• Stripe for subscriptions
• Cloudflare Pages for hosting

Build time

One weekend. Most of the effort goes into the AI prompt — getting it to output a real recipe instead of a wishy-washy “you could try X” response.

Monetization

• Free: 3 recipe rewrites per month
• Pro: $4.99/mo unlimited
• Annual: $39/year (save ~35%)

Why I’m not building it

The real path to revenue runs through someone who already has a food audience. A food blogger, meal-prep newsletter, or cooking YouTuber could launch this and have thousands of paying customers in 18 months. I have a tech audience — I’d be marketing this from zero on the wrong platforms.

If you run a recipe blog, a meal prep brand, or a food TikTok, this is your bolt-on product. People already trust your recipes. They’d trust your rewriter.

Ship it yourself or have me ship it

• DIY: Most of the work is the AI prompt. Treat the rewrite as structured output — input is recipe plus restrictions, output is the same recipe in the same format with restrictions handled. Test it on weird stuff. People will paste in chocolate cake recipes and ask you to remove sugar.
• DFY: I’ll build it in a weekend and hand you the keys. Book a call →

Get the planning prompt

RecipeReplace is a one-shot generator with light user persistence — input goes in, customized output comes back. The planning prompt below is tuned for generator-type builds. Paste it into Claude, replace the pitch, run the conversation.

I'm looking to build an website called Recipe Replace. It's a website that allows you to paste a recipe (text/image/pdf) and state what components you're missing. It will provide suggested alternatives based on what you have available. Ask any questions then give me the prompts needed to build the website in Claude Code. I'd prefer to use the following stack but am open to other free options: 
- Next.js 14 (App Router) + TypeScript + Tailwind CSS
- Supabase for user accounts, generation history, and saved outputs
- Stripe for subscriptions (freemium model)
- OpenAI or Anthropic API for the generation logic
- Cloudflare Pages for hosting
- Postmark for transactional email

Idea 2: Fish Enbigener

One-liner: An app that makes the fish in your photo look bigger so you can win the group chat.

Enbigen, verb — to make something significantly larger via the internet.

Who it’s for

• Anglers in group chats trying to win the “best catch of the season” bet
• People whose Instagram fishing post got fewer likes than they hoped
• New fishermen who haven’t caught anything impressive yet
• Bachelor party gag gifts
• Father’s Day novelty content

For context: r/Fishing alone has 2.3 million members. There’s a real “fish brag” subculture across Reddit, Facebook groups, and dedicated fishing forums. This is a real distribution channel for a joke product.

How it works

Three tiers, each more committed to the bit than the last:

• $3 — Basic. Upload your photo. AI detects the fish, scales it up by 30-50%, blends it back into the original image. The fish is bigger. That’s it.
• $9 — Trophy. Same as Basic, plus a fake tournament weigh-in graphic overlaid on the photo. Real-looking weight, species name, the whole presentation.
• $19 — Full Alibi. AI replaces the background entirely. You’re on a different boat. The fish is a different species. The lake is a different lake. The sunset is a different sunset. It’s not your fish anymore. It’s a better fish.

Preview-before-pay flow on all tiers — user sees the result watermarked, pays to remove the watermark and download.

Suggested stack

• Next.js 14 + Tailwind + TypeScript
• Supabase for order tracking
• Stripe for one-time payments
• Replicate or fal.ai for image generation (image-to-image with the fish bounding box scaled)
• OpenAI vision API for the “is this actually a fish” check before processing
• Cloudflare Pages for hosting

Build time

A weekend, plus 2-3 extra hours for the image classifier that confirms the upload is actually a fish before processing. You want this. Trust me.

Monetization

• One-time payments per photo (no subscriptions — you don’t fish every day)
• Tiered pricing as above
• Optional bundle: 5 credits for $12 (encourages saving credits for the next trip)

Why I’m not building it

Fishing as a vertical needs someone who actually fishes. The audience would smell it. A real angler with a Facebook group, a YouTube channel, or a fishing newsletter could launch this and clean up. I don’t fish, and the marketing would be hollow without that credibility.

There’s also a 6-12 month window before AI photo editing in every consumer app makes this redundant. That’s enough time to make real money — but you have to move now.

Ship it yourself or have me ship it

• DIY: The hardest part is consistent AI output. Image-to-image generation is unpredictable. The preview-before-pay flow is non-negotiable — it’s the only way users will trust the product enough to pay.
• DFY: I can build this in a weekend and hand you the keys. Book a call →

Get the planning prompt

Fish Enbigener is a one-shot generator with image-based input and output. Same planning prompt template as RecipeReplace — the generator prompt covers both. Drop your email and I’ll send it over.

I'm looking to build an website called Fish Embigener. It's a website that allows you to upload an image of a fish (either alone or being held by the person who caught it). The user can set a percentage to increase the size of the fish and the website will output the same image with just the fish enlarged. Ask any questions then give me the prompts needed to build the website in Claude Code. I'd prefer to use the following stack but am open to other free options: 
- Next.js 14 (App Router) + TypeScript + Tailwind CSS
- Supabase for order tracking, image storage, and audit logs
- Stripe for one-time payments (no subscriptions)
- Cloudflare Pages for hosting
- Cloudflare R2 or Supabase Storage for user-uploaded and generated images
- Replicate, fal.ai, or OpenAI for image generation (image-to-image, inpainting, or full regeneration depending on the task)
- OpenAI Vision API or similar for input classification (confirming the input image matches what we expect)

Recap

• RecipeReplace: Real business. Boring. Would print money if a food creator built it.
• Fish Enbigener: Joke business. Would also print money. Briefly. For the right person, briefly is enough.

Ship one. Tell me.

FAQ

Are these ideas actually free to use?

Yes. Take them, build them, sell them, keep everything you make. The only ask — tell me if you ship one so I can feature you.

What do I get when I opt in for the planning prompt?

One email. One prompt. Paste it into Claude and it generates the full build plan — stack decisions, scope, edge cases, abuse vectors, and the sequence of Claude Code prompts to actually build it. Same workflow I use for every Build and Bail project.

Why give away ideas (and prompts) that could make money?

Because I can’t build all of them. The pipeline is infinite. Bandwidth is finite. If an idea sits on my list for six months, it’s not getting built — someone else might as well.

Is the Fish Enbigener serious?

Yes. The premise is dumb. The business would work.

What’s the stack you usually recommend?

Next.js 14 App Router, Tailwind, TypeScript, Supabase, and Cloudflare Pages. Full breakdown on my tools page.

Can I hire you to build one of these?

Yes. Every Tuesday post includes a “have me build it” link.

When does the next Two Free Tuesday drop?

Every Tuesday.

More from Build and Bail

• Two Free Tuesday #001: Invoice Nudge + OOO as a Service
• The tools I use to ship every project
• WhoStat — daily sports stats game listed on Flippa

See you next Tuesday.

Read more at Build and Bail

Every Tuesday I drop two business ideas I’d hand to someone and say “go build this.” These are ideas I’m specifically not building — because I already have too many projects running, or because I’d lose interest by Wednesday, or because the idea is dumb but might work anyway.

Two reasons the ideas are free:

• Ideas aren’t the bottleneck. Shipping is.
• If you build one, it becomes a case study. Everyone wins.

Each Tuesday post includes:

• The pitch
• Who it’s for
• The stack I’d use (links to my tools page)
• Weekend-build estimate
• How to monetize it
• Why I’m not building it
• A DIY path and a “have me build it” path
• The exact prompt I’d use in Claude to plan the whole build

That last one is free if you want it. Drop your email in the block after each idea and I’ll send it over.

This week: one that could actually print money, and one that probably shouldn’t — but might anyway.

Idea 1: Invoice Nudge

One-liner: A dead-simple tool that follows up on unpaid invoices so you don’t have to.

Who it’s for

Freelancers, consultants, agencies — anyone who’s sent a $2,400 invoice into the void and forgot to chase it for three weeks.

How it works

• You CC your invoice email to a custom address
• It parses the client, amount, and due date
• If unpaid by the due date, it auto-sends follow-ups on day 3, 7, 14, and 30
• Tone escalates — polite, then firm, then “interest charges apply”
• Reply “paid” to any thread to mark it closed

Suggested stack

• Next.js 14 (App Router) + Tailwind + TypeScript
• Supabase for auth and database
• Postmark for inbound email parsing (does 80% of the work)
• Stripe for subscriptions
• Cloudflare Pages for hosting

Build time

One weekend. Two if you’ve never touched inbound email parsing before.

Monetization

• Free: 3 active invoices
• Pro: $9/mo, unlimited
• Agency: $29/mo, multi-seat

Why I’m not building it

I don’t freelance. It’s not my problem, so I’d lose interest by day three. But if you freelance, this is a real business — boring, useful, and people will pay for it.

Ship it yourself or have me ship it

• DIY: Stack above. The only hard part is inbound email — Postmark’s parse endpoint covers most of it.
• DFY: I’ll build it in a weekend and hand you the keys. Book a call →

Get the planning prompt

Every project on this site starts with a 30-minute Claude chat that turns the idea into a sequence of Claude Code prompts. Drop your email and I’ll send you the exact planning prompt I’d use for Invoice Nudge — run it yourself, get your own build plan, ship it.

I'm looking to build an website called Invoice Nudge. It's a recurring SaaS — auth, billing, multiple users, admin panel, inbound email parsing. It should be a dead-simple tool that follows up on unpaid invoices so you don't have to. Ask any questions then give me the prompts needed to build the website in Claude Code. I'd prefer to use the following stack but am open to other free options: 
- Git hub as repository
- Next.js 14 (App Router) + TypeScript + Tailwind CSS
- Supabase for any minimal data storage (orders, generated outputs)
- Cloudflare Pages for hosting

Idea 2: Out of Office as a Service

One-liner: A service that writes a believable out-of-office auto-reply and — for an extra fee — generates fake vacation photos to post on LinkedIn.

Who it’s for

People who need a mental health day but work somewhere that requires a paper trail.

How it works

• Pick a destination (Portugal, cabin in Vermont, “visiting family”)
• AI writes the OOO message with a realistic return date
• AI generates 2–3 stock-looking vacation photos
• Optional: drip-schedule a “sending this from the road” LinkedIn post for day three

Suggested stack

• Next.js 14 + Tailwind + TypeScript
• Supabase
• Any image generation API
• Stripe for one-time payments

Build time

A weekend. The landing page is four hours.

Monetization

• $19 per trip
• $49 deluxe with photos
• $99 full alibi with scheduled LinkedIn post

Why I’m not building it

The unit economics are bad unless it goes viral. Building a joke business that needs to go viral to work isn’t a plan — it’s a hope. But if you think you can market it, it would print money for a month. For some people, a month is enough.

Ship it yourself or have me ship it

• DIY: Most of this is a prompt and a form. Landing page in four hours.
• DFY: I’d rather build this for someone who thinks they can sell it. Book a call →

Get the planning prompt

OOO as a Service is a different build — one-shot generator instead of a recurring SaaS — so the planning prompt is tuned for that. Drop your email and I’ll send it over.

I'm looking to build an website that writes a believable out-of-office auto-reply and — for an extra fee — generates fake vacation photos to post on LinkedIn. Ask any questions then give me the prompts needed to build the website in Claude Code. I'd prefer to use the following stack but am open to other free options: 
- Git hub as repository
- Next.js 14 (App Router) + TypeScript + Tailwind CSS
- Supabase for any minimal data storage (orders, generated outputs)
- Cloudflare Pages for hosting

Recap

• Invoice Nudge: Real business. Boring. Would probably work.
• Out of Office as a Service: Joke business. Would also probably work. Briefly.

Ship one. Tell me.

FAQ

Are these ideas actually free to use?

Yes. Take them, build them, sell them, keep everything you make. The only ask — tell me if you ship one so I can feature you.

What do I get when I opt in for the planning prompt?

One email. One prompt. Paste it into Claude and it generates the full build plan — stack decisions, schema, API structure, and the sequence of Claude Code prompts to actually build it. Takes about 30 minutes of back-and-forth. Same process I use for every Build and Bail project.

Why give away ideas (and prompts) that could make money?

Because I can’t build all of them. The pipeline is infinite. Bandwidth is finite. If an idea sits on my list for six months, it’s not getting built — someone else might as well. And if the prompts help you ship faster, that’s the whole point.

What’s the stack you usually recommend?

Next.js 14 App Router, Tailwind, TypeScript, Supabase, and Cloudflare Pages. Full breakdown on my tools page.

Can I hire you to build one of these?

Yes. Every Tuesday post includes a “have me build it” link. Typical engagements: a weekend MVP handoff, a build-and-launch package, or a consulting session where I plan the whole thing with you.

When does the next Two Free Tuesday drop?

Every Tuesday (unless I bail on this series).

More from Build and Bail

• The tools I use to ship every project
• How I built and listed WhoStat on Flippa
• Emergency Pants: the pants delivery service that shouldn’t exist

See you next Tuesday.

Read more at Build and Bail

Episode 2 of the Build and Bail podcast is live, and it’s the canonical Build and Bail story.

It started with a web form. I needed a fake business name and my brain handed me “Emergency Pants For When You Poop Yourself.” Two and a half hours later I had a fully branded site.

What got built:

• A real homepage with a real domain
• Tiered pricing (because of course there’s a premium tier)
• A kids package
• A facility cleaning add-on
• A poop emoji favicon
• An AI-generated commercial featuring a guy in flannel saying “we’ve all been there before”

Total cost: $0. Total time: 2.5 hours. Total dignity: questionable.

This is the build that taught me the whole pattern — pick the dumbest idea you can defend for 30 seconds, ship it, see if anyone laughs, move on. Emergency Pants is the reason Build and Bail exists.

Listen below. The commercial is in the show notes and on the build log if you want to see it for yourself.

Podcast Transcript

It started with a web form. I was testing something out and needed to type in a fake business name. You know how your brain just fills things in sometimes? Mine filled in “Emergency Pants For When You Poop Yourself.”

I laughed. Then I stopped laughing. Then I thought — wait. Is this actually a business?

One hour later I was building a website.

This is Build and Bail. Build the idea stuck in your head, 

The idea:

The premise is simple. You’re out in public. Something goes wrong. Catastrophically wrong. And now you need pants. Fast.

Emergency Pants delivers fresh clothes — pants and underwear — to your location in central New Jersey within ninety minutes. A hundred and fifty bucks. All the clothing is sourced from local thrift shops. The delivery van has the word “Laundry” on the side, in quotes, because discretion matters but honesty matters slightly more.

Once I started building, I couldn’t stop adding features. Kids package — drop-offs at schools, sports fields, birthday parties. Because children are absolutely not immune to poop emergencies. A four-hundred-fifty-dollar facility cleaning option for the really bad situations. Then I expanded coverage to include pee incidents too, because fairness.

And then I made a little brown poop emoji favicon. So when you have the site open in your browser, there’s a tiny poop icon in the tab. Absolutely essential. Non-negotiable feature.

The commercial:

The site looked legit. Too legit. At that point you kind of have to make a commercial.

My original plan was to film it myself. Use my family as the cast — real people reenacting various public poop emergencies. Great creative vision. Then a monster snowstorm hit New Jersey and killed that plan immediately.

So I went to Google Flow, which is an AI video tool in Google Labs. I’d used it a little before but hadn’t really pushed it. I asked it to generate three scenes of everyday people having accidents out in public. Relatable content. Then I generated the star of the commercial — a working-class guy, early forties, jeans and flannel, pulling a small bag out of a van and walking toward a building. His line: “We’ve all been there before. Living life. Then poop happens.”

That’s the tagline. That’s the whole pitch. If you don’t connect with that on a human level, I don’t know what to tell you.

I extended the clip to have him walk inside and deliver the rest of the sell, pulled some screenshots from the website, added audio, then brought everything into Canva to trim it up, drop in the logo, add the URL.

The result:

Two and a half hours. That’s what this took. Some of that was just waiting for AI prompts to generate. The rest was me building a fully branded, fully functional website for a company that delivers emergency pants to people who’ve pooped themselves in public. With a commercial. And a poop favicon.

There are real businesses with real funding that don’t look this put-together. I built this because a web form needed a fake name and my brain wouldn’t let it go.

Is it a real business? Almost certainly not. Could it be? That’s the weird part. The infrastructure is there. The site works. The pricing makes sense — thrift shop pants marked up with a convenience fee. Local delivery in a discreet van. There’s a version of this that actually exists and I’m not sure whether that’s inspiring or terrifying.

But that’s the point. You don’t know which ideas are real until you build them. And you can build them in an afternoon now. The tools exist. The excuses don’t.

Outro:

Full build log is on the site. The commercial is there too. And if you want to see the actual Emergency Pants website — fully functional, completely absurd — there’s a link in the show notes.

Next time you have a dumb idea, don’t write it down. Build it. It takes less time than you think, and it’s way more fun than planning.

I’m CT. This is Build and Bail.

Want the system in PDF form? Grab the free Build and Bail Playbook: buildandbail.com/playbook

Read more at Build and Bail

I’m a validation engineer. I’m not a developer. Before AI, I’d never shipped a production app in my life.

In the last year I’ve shipped:

• A playoff fantasy football site that replaced six years of Google Sheets hell
• A sports stats guessing game
• A calculator that tells you how many kids you could beat in a tug of war
• A satirical investor-relations site for my own abandoned projects
• An emergency pants delivery service (yes, really)

None of that existed before because I couldn’t build it. The skill gap was real. AI didn’t “enhance my productivity.” It took me from zero to one on things I was locked out of.

So when I hear “AI is taking from writers, coders, artists,” I hear it, and I also need to say the other half: for a lot of people, it’s handing them the keys to a door they couldn’t open.

The part where people are right

The fear isn’t stupid. People spent years building skills that a model can now approximate in seconds. That hurts. It’s also fair to be pissed when a model was trained on your work without your permission and is now competing with you. I’m not going to pretend that’s nothing.

The part where I’m pushing back anyway

I’m not using AI to mimic anyone. I’m not asking it to write like a living author or paint like a living artist or clone someone’s voice. I’m using it to build things I already wanted to build but didn’t have the technical chops to execute. That’s not theft. That’s a power tool.

“AI is stealing from artists” gets flattened into “AI is bad,” and those aren’t the same sentence. Plagiarism is bad. Deepfakes are bad. Flooding Etsy with AI knockoffs of a real artist’s work is bad. Using Claude to wire up a scoring engine for my fantasy league is… using a tool.

The ATM story is the one people should actually know

Every tech shift comes with a funeral for jobs that don’t actually die. The cleanest example is ATMs.

When ATMs rolled out in the 1970s and accelerated hard through the ’90s, the assumption was obvious: machine does cash, teller is done. The data says the opposite happened, for a long time.

• In 1985, the U.S. had 60,000 ATMs and 485,000 bank tellers. In 2002, there were 352,000 ATMs and 527,000 bank tellers
• The number of tellers required to operate a branch office in the average urban market fell from 20 to 13 between 1988 and 2004
• Urban bank branches increased by 43% during peak ATM proliferation
• Net result: more total teller jobs, not fewer

And the job itself got better. Tellers became part of what banks call the “customer relationship team.” It’s a different sort of skill. Maybe it’s a higher skill. There is some evidence that their wages have gone up. They are hiring more college graduates as bank tellers. The work got more interesting.

Tellers eventually did decline, but not from ATMs. The huge decline in bank teller employment over the last 15-odd years is mainly a story about iPhones and what they made possible. Different technology, twenty years later.

The point isn’t “don’t worry, nobody ever loses.” The point is the first-order prediction — “machine does task, human is gone” — is almost always wrong. The second-order effects are where the real story lives, and they’re usually weirder than anyone guessed.

Every other example tells the same story

• Portrait painters in the 1840s called photography a refuge for hacks and mechanical frauds. Painting didn’t die. It got weirder and better. Impressionism exists partly because photography freed painters from having to be accurate.
• Calculators were going to make kids bad at math. Kids just do different math now.
• Synthesizers were going to end music. They invented entire genres instead.
• Spell check was going to kill literacy. You’re reading this.
• The internet was going to destroy encyclopedias. It did. I don’t miss them.

Each shift came with real losses. Someone got worse off every time. I’m not pretending the pain didn’t happen. But the pie got bigger, the work got different, and in almost every case we ended up with more of the thing, not less.

My actual position

AI is a tool. It’s the best one I’ve ever used. It lets a guy with no CS degree and no design background make things he used to have to beg or pay other people to make for him. For a lot of people who had ideas but no way to execute, it’s the first real shot they’ve had.

Use it, don’t use it, hate it, whatever. I’m going to keep using it to ship weird stuff and write down what happened.

— CT

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Six seasons of this. Six seasons of cross-referencing box scores at midnight on a Sunday, praying I don’t fat-finger someone’s receiving yards and start a controversy in the group chat.

The league rules aren’t complicated. They’re just specific enough that no fantasy platform supports them.

Here’s the format: you draft NFL playoff players. No bench. Just a starting lineup — QB, two RBs, two WRs, a TE, and a FLEX. Points are cumulative across the entire postseason. No head-to-head matchups. No weekly resets. Your guys score until they stop playing football.

When a player’s team gets eliminated, you get substitutions. Four of them. Total. For the whole playoffs. Use one because your receiver’s team lost in the wild card round, fine — but now you’ve only got three left. Use one voluntarily because you think you can upgrade at tight end? Bold move. Same cost.

There’s a pick deadline each round. PPR scoring with 2-point conversion math that requires subtracting out the receiving yards, rushing yards, and reception points that were already awarded — otherwise you’re double-counting. The kind of rules that make perfect sense when you’re explaining them over beers and make every fantasy app’s settings page completely useless.

So every January, I become a human spreadsheet. Collecting emails. Cross-referencing box scores. Copy-pasting stat lines into a Google Sheet and hoping I didn’t accidentally give someone else’s touchdown to the wrong guy.

This year I decided to stop doing that.

The Planning Conversation

Same workflow as WhoStat. Before I opened Claude Code, I sat in a regular Claude chat and talked through every rule, every edge case, every “wait, what happens when…” scenario.

Roster structure. Substitution logic. The scoring engine — which turned out to be the hardest part, because the 2-point conversion math has to actively undo the PPR and yardage points that were already awarded to avoid counting them twice. That’s not a setting you toggle. That’s custom logic that I’ve been doing in my head while staring at a spreadsheet at 11pm for six straight Januarys.

I walked through pick deadlines, the admin panel I’d need to enter scores, how the public standings page should work so people can stop texting me “what’s the score,” and what happens when someone burns all four subs by the divisional round.

Thirty minutes. Ten specific prompts covering project setup, data schema, the scoring engine, a query layer, public standings and team detail pages, an admin panel, business rule validation, API routes, and deployment.

Ten prompts. That’s the whole app that replaces six years of spreadsheet misery.

What It Actually Does Now

The site has a registration page where players pick their own seven-player roster and submit it themselves. No more emails. No more me manually typing “Josh Allen” into a cell at 1am because someone sent me their picks as a bulleted text message with no last names.

There’s a public leaderboard so everyone can check standings without texting the commissioner. A player results page showing how every drafted player is scoring across all rounds. An admin panel where I enter stats after each round — still manual, but now I’m entering them once into a real interface instead of hunting through a spreadsheet.

And the best part: a Hall of Champions page with every winner and runner-up since 2021. Gerard Balsamo sitting at two titles and three finals appearances like the dynasty he apparently is. The league’s history actually lives somewhere now instead of in scattered group chat memories.

Hosted on Railway. No database — just the app doing its thing. The commissioner still enters scores manually, but the site handles the math, the standings, the substitution tracking, and the public-facing everything.

The Build

Ten prompts, fed to Claude Code one at a time. The same approach that worked for WhoStat — architect in chat, execute in Code.

The scoring engine was the most satisfying part to watch come together. The 2-point conversion logic is genuinely tricky: you have to calculate the base PPR and yardage points, then figure out what portion came on 2-point plays, then subtract that out so you’re only crediting the conversion bonus. I’ve been doing this math manually for years. Watching Claude Code turn it into actual working logic felt like handing off a chore I didn’t realize I hated.

The registration flow was the other big win. People can go to the site, see the available players, pick their seven slots, and submit. No account needed. The commissioner (me) reviews and confirms. That single feature eliminates half the emails I used to get every January.

Why This One’s Different

Most of my builds are absurd on purpose. A pants delivery service. A URL lengthener. A calculator about children and tug of war.

This one replaces a real process that’s been annoying me every January since 2021. No more collecting picks from email. No more manually looking up every stat line on ESPN. No more copy-pasting numbers into a Google Sheet at midnight and hoping I didn’t give someone else’s touchdown to the wrong guy.

The league members get a real site with live standings and a place to register their own teams. I get an admin panel instead of a spreadsheet. Everyone wins — especially me, because I won the whole league in 2024 and now there’s a permanent record of it on the internet.

Will I maintain it forever? The playoffs only last a month. Build it once, use it every January, tweak it if the rules change. That’s not bailing — that’s seasonal engineering.

Build status: Live
Cost: Hosted on Railway
Users: The same 36 guys who’ve been arguing about playoff fantasy since 2021
Bail risk: Low — unless I somehow lose my own league, in which case the site might experience unexpected downtime

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The idea was simple: Wordle, but for sports nerds.

You get a stat line — career numbers, no name attached — and three guesses to figure out which player it belongs to. Get it wrong, you get a hint. Get it wrong again, bigger hint. Three sports, three daily puzzles: NFL, NBA, MLB. Come back tomorrow for new ones.

That’s WhoStat.

The interesting part isn’t the idea. There are a dozen sports guessing games out there. The interesting part is how I built it — because I used Claude twice. First as a thinking partner to plan the whole thing. Then as the builder to actually make it.

Phase One: Thinking Out Loud With Claude

Before I wrote a single line of code — before I opened Claude Code at all — I sat down in a regular Claude chat and just started talking through the project.

This is the part most people skip when they talk about building with AI. Everyone wants to show the finished product. Nobody talks about the conversation that got them there.

I started broad. Here’s what I want to build. A daily sports guessing game. Three sports. Stat-based clues. Wordle-style progression. Then I started asking Claude to help me make decisions. How should the hint system work? Should it be one puzzle that rotates sports, or three puzzles running at the same time? What stats actually make good clues versus ones that give it away immediately?

Claude helped me think through it the way a coworker would — except this coworker never gets tired of your side project and doesn’t change the subject to talk about their own thing.

By the end of that conversation, I had a clear architecture: three simultaneous daily puzzles with independent game states, a static site with no backend, player data bundled as JSON at build time, and a phased prompt plan I could hand directly to Claude Code.

That last part is the move. I didn’t just plan the app — I planned the prompts. Twelve of them, organized into five build phases: scaffolding and data, game logic, UI, social sharing and polish, and deployment. Each prompt was specific enough that Claude Code could execute it without me having to babysit every decision.

Regular Claude chat became the architect. Claude Code became the contractor. Same brain, different jobs.

Phase Two: Building It With Claude Code

The build itself used my usual stack: Claude Code writing the code, pushing to GitHub, deployed through Cloudflare Pages. Next.js with static export and Tailwind CSS. No database, no server, no API calls at runtime. Everything baked in at build time.

I fed Claude Code the prompts one at a time and let it work. Scaffolding went up clean. Game logic came together. The UI landed in a good spot without much fussing.

Then the problems started.

The Snags

The API wall. My original plan was to pull player data from real sports APIs — balldontlie.io for NBA, the MLB Stats API, and so on. Smart plan. One problem: Claude Code runs in a sandboxed environment, and those APIs aren’t reachable from inside it. The connection just dies.

So I pivoted. Instead of building a data pipeline that fetches from APIs, I had Claude Code generate curated static JSON datasets directly. Two hundred and fifty players per sport, all active from 2015 to present including recently retired guys. Career stats, accolades, difficulty ratings — all baked right into the build. No API dependency at all.

Honestly? The result is better. No rate limits. No API keys to manage. No risk of a third-party service going down and taking my game with it. Sometimes the workaround is the upgrade.

The team history problem. This one was sneakier. Players change teams. A lot. And the initial data wasn’t reflecting that — guys were showing up with only their current team, which makes the guessing game either too easy or misleading depending on who it is.

If you’re trying to guess a player from their career stats and the only team listed is where they finished, you’re missing half the puzzle. A quarterback’s career numbers look very different when you know they played for three franchises versus one. That context matters for the game to feel fair and fun.

Getting Claude Code to handle team histories properly — multiple teams, in order, with the right years — took some back and forth. Not a showstopper, but the kind of thing where you realize the data model you planned in phase one didn’t account for the messy reality of actual sports careers.

What WhoStat Actually Does

You go to whostat.com. You pick a sport — NFL, NBA, or MLB. You see a stat card with career numbers: touchdowns, yards, completions, whatever’s relevant to that sport. No name. No photo. Just numbers.

You get three guesses. Each wrong guess unlocks a new hint — maybe the player’s years active, maybe an accolade, maybe a team. By the third guess, you’ve got enough information that you should be able to narrow it down if you know your stuff.

Get it right and you can share your result. Come back tomorrow and there are three new puzzles waiting.

The player pool covers 250 players per sport, all from roughly the last decade, which keeps it current enough that casual fans have a shot but deep enough that the hard ones will stump people.

The Two-Claude Workflow

The real takeaway from this build isn’t WhoStat itself — it’s the process.

Using Claude chat to plan and Claude Code to build is a workflow that makes these projects dramatically faster. The planning conversation isn’t filler. It’s where you make the decisions that save you hours of debugging later. What’s the data model? How does state management work? What are the edge cases? You answer all of that before a single file gets created.

Then when you hand Claude Code a well-defined prompt, it actually executes. It’s not guessing what you want. It’s building what you already decided.

The whole thing — planning, building, debugging the API issue, fixing the team history problem, deploying — took a few hours. For a fully functional three-sport daily game with 750 players and a share feature.

I’m not saying every build will go this smoothly. But the two-step approach — think first, build second, with the same tool doing both — is the closest thing I’ve found to a repeatable system for shipping side projects fast.

And that’s kind of the whole point of Build and Bail.

Play it: whostat.com

Stack: Claude (chat) → Claude Code → Next.js → GitHub Pages → Cloudflare

Status: Live. Until I get bored.

Read more at Build and Bail