Every year my family runs a fishing competition: whoever catches the most total inches of fish wins. This year, on Bass Lake near Interlochen, Michigan, I used Claude to build the leaderboard, a tournament board that everyone could update from their own phone, live from the boat. It looks like a hand-painted lodge sign, keeps score like a stats department, and talks trash like a sibling.
The final board, frozen at the end of the week: roasts included. See it live →
A single web page that seven people, ages roughly ten to grandmother, could update between casts. Under the vintage tournament styling it tracks every trip, every angler, and every fish, then recomputes the whole competitive landscape on each catch.
The whole thing was built in conversation with Claude, starting from one request: make a fun leaderboard for our fishing contest. A working mockup with sample data came back in minutes. From there the family drove the roadmap, and the software followed the arguments.
Someone logged three fish under the wrong angler, so the board got an edit function. I got credited with a trip I never took, and the resulting skunk roast stung enough that the API got a roster-removal action the same hour. The generic trash talk was funny for a day, then we upgraded to personality-specific roasts built on family lore: the worm whisperer, the bald Englishman with his bobbers, the matriarch who spits on the bait for luck. When the week ended, the logging form came off and the board froze into an archive.
Technically it stays small on purpose: one HTML file, one serverless function, one JSON blob for storage. No framework, no database, no accounts. Total cost: zero dollars.
Built with Claude in Cowork mode, hosted on this site with a Netlify serverless function and Blobs storage. The anglers are my family; some photos are omitted for privacy. Standings are final as of July 2026. No turtles were counted.
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