I've Always Wanted to Build Stuff. Now I Actually Am.

I’ve had a running list of ideas for years. Geocities site as a kid, more WordPress installs than I care to count, even a stint as webmaster for ozarksbeekeepers.org. I clearly wasn’t afraid of the web. I just never actually built anything that was mine.

But I am genuinely, deeply lazy.

Not full self-deprecation — laziness has a useful side. It drives me to automate, simplify, find the path of least resistance and make that path actually work. Most of my career has been that instinct in action. Backend tools, scripts, things running on cron jobs that nobody ever looked at. Efficient, invisible, done.

The shadow side of laziness is that if there’s no easy path, I don’t start. Writing a full stack application from scratch was never the easy path. So I didn’t. The list of ideas just kept growing.

media-analyzer #

The project I’m most excited about is media-analyzer, and it’s something I’ve been wanting to build for a long time.

The frustration that spawned it: most tools that handle media files treat them like library items. Plex, Jellyfin, Beets — great at organizing a library, not really built for managing the files themselves. Filenames, folder structure, embedded metadata — the ID3 tags, the stuff baked into video and VR files — that’s always an afterthought. A plugin. A side feature someone half-finished.

I wanted something built around that problem from the start. Not a media library. A file management tool where the files are the point.

It’s also the first thing I’ve built that I can actually use. My whole professional background is tools that ran silently in the background — efficient, invisible, done. If I’m being honest, deeply unsatisfying. I have always wanted to build something people actually open and interact with. I require external validation apparently.

The New Year’s Eve Detour #

Around New Year’s Eve I had a conversation with Claude that went something like: “what are some realistic ways I could generate extra income?”

I was not actually asking for realistic ways. I was asking to get rich.

Claude walked me back from the ledge. We landed on an Etsy shop — digital products, maybe AI-generated art or printables. I got into it for about a week. Did research, thought about niches, started sketching out what I’d sell.

Then the path got longer than I expected, and I moved on.

It wasn’t really a failure. More of a temperature check. The idea wasn’t bad, I just wasn’t actually passionate about it — I was excited about passive income, which is a different thing. This is absolutely not a plug for my Etsy store. Here is my Etsy store.

Claude Code — The Honest Take #

Here’s what actually changed: I started using Claude Code, and it finally made the path short enough that I’d take it.

The gap between “I have an idea” and “I have a thing I built” used to be enormous. Documentation, tooling, getting stuck at hour two on something stupid, closing the laptop. I’ve done that loop more times than I can count.

Claude Code collapsed that gap. Not because it writes everything for me — the projects where I’ve let it just run have produced stuff that looks right but has real problems underneath. Vibe coding is a trap. You end up with an app that demos well and has holes in the design, the security, the logic. I’m not experienced enough to always catch that, which is exactly why I stay involved.

When I’m actually reading the code, asking questions, understanding what’s being built — it’s like having a senior dev next to me with infinite patience and no judgment about what I don’t know. My brain has been on fire for months. I’m learning more right now than I have in years.

I spent my whole career in awe of people who could build full stack applications. I assumed there was some missing piece in me.

Turns out it was just friction.