47 Chrome Tabs Later
A deck-building problem turned into a weekend father-son coding project
My son is 13. And lately, connecting with him means entering a world I know nothing about. Right now that world is Magic the Gathering (MTG). He’s deep into it... deck strategies, card synergies, things I can barely follow. I grew up around MTG but never got into it myself. Twenty years later, of course my kid is obsessed with it. That wasn’t me,I had nothing to do with that. I’m still waiting have to break out the Gundam model kits with him… maybe in a couple years.
Most days I’m the confused dad that just says cool!!, oh really?!, that’s neat!, while he talks about all MTG things I don’t understand. Am I a bad parent? But I figured if I can’t meet him in his world, maybe I can meet him halfway. Well…this past weekend, we found that halfway point.
We built an app together.
Chrome tabs for dayz
Who’s with me on this? My son spends hours browsing the internet trying to find cards, build decks, and keep track of strategies for MTG. Dozens of Chrome tabs and groups open all at once… for “organizing". Ofc there are deck building tools out there already. We tried each one for a short time and confirm what we already suspected... the existing tools were confusing and complex, bloated with things we didn’t need and ads… so many ads. Clearly not designed for a 13-year-old trying to get into the hobby. That was enough for us to start a brainstorm about what we really wanted, and what the problem was. What if we could just... built something better? Not better for the world. Better for him. Something clean, minimal, and designed around exactly how he wanted to use it.
the afternoon of our minds got exploded
To preface where I’m coming from…I’m a 3D artist, I make games. I know some Python and C# but nothing I would put on a resume. I am not a software engineer. JavaScript? Completely foreign to me. APIs, modern web dev tooling, deployment pipelines... I knew basically none of it. The only thing I knew how to do was push a repo to GitHub. That was about it.
But we had Mr. Claude on our team. Claude Code that is.
I generated and talked through our brainstorming session with my son, then chatted through our brainstorming session with Claude doe. From there, a detailed plan and spec was created with all of the exact steps to get a tool like this up and running. It walked me through everything… step by step. The file structure, the codebase, setting up a local server in Zed. It was quite a learning experience, and now I’m a little smarter with web development.
Hit Enter and we’re off… 15 min later Claude had built us its first prototype. And it worked! Not flawlessly... but it worked! 🤯
At that point we were convinced this could actually replace the Chrome tabs. And from there we iterated. Bug fixes, tweaks, new features. Every time something new got pushed, all we could say to each other was this is so good! We couldn’t have built this without working this way. Full stop. If I had tried to learn enough JavaScript and web dev tooling to build this from scratch, it would’ve taken weeks. Probably longer. Probably never. One of those someday projects. But it was really amazing… we had an idea in the morning and a working app by the afternoon. A tangible thing. Deployed on the web.
We live in a time where you can build a personalized tool faster than ever. And the result actually fits your needs exactly. No compromises, no workarounds, no features you’ll never use cluttering up the screen. I think my rough rule of thumb now is this... if it takes me more than an hour to ramp up on existing software to get where I want to be, I might as well just build it. That’s the wild part of where we’re at right now. It’s really got me to re-think the way I make prototypes for game dev. I’m just excited, what a crazy time and place we live in today!
On creating
I still have strong feelings about generative AI. Especially with art. That hasn’t changed and I don’t think it will anytime soon. I’ll be the first one to tell you how overwhelmed I feel with all of this. The speed at which AI is advancing and changing the way we create is crazy. Its hard wrap my head around it, tbh.
But this felt very different.
This wasn’t a product going to market. It wasn’t for making money. It wasn’t competing with anyone. It was solving a small problem to make things just ever so slightly easier. When it’s a tool for personal creation, and you’re using it to make something you couldn’t have made otherwise, for yourself, maybe that’s okay.
And the biggest win wasn’t the app. It was the afternoon. My son is reaching an age where it’s harder to find those windows of connection. He’s getting into things I don’t understand and soon the punk is going to come out and not want anything to do with me. But for the short time, I got to sit next to him and build and create something together. That’s pretty neat in my book! If nothing else comes out of this, that’s okay. At least I now know wtf a Badgermole Cub mana ramp board wipe aggo deck is. Tha’ll come in handy later on in life…I’m sure of it. LOL.
Anyway, The app is still buggy. It works, but it’s rough around the edges. If you’re into MTG or just curious about what a confused dad and his son built in an afternoon, check it out here
