Dozens of little apps for family, like a printer page without the ads
The Android apps for their old Brother printer were terrible and ad-ridden. With Claude Code in the browser on their phone, they built their own print page, one of dozens of little family apps.
Done withClaude CodeSpotted· by HN user nihakue· Oct 15, 2026
Result Costs basically nothing to run
“Using this set up I've created dozens of little silly web applications for my family and friends, none of them were more complicated than little sketches but we've gotten some real pleasure out of them.”
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
Set up a starter template on small cloud machines with Claude Code running in the browser, reachable from their phone, and a public web address for each app. When the Android options for printing to their old Brother printer turned out to be terrible and ad-supported, they built their own print page.
How it went
They’ve made dozens of small web apps for family and friends that have given real pleasure. Only they and their spouse will likely use the print page, but it costs basically nothing to run, and they’re confident an LLM could fix it if it ever breaks.
Try it yourself with Claude Code
Build me a tiny web page I can open on my phone to print to my [printer model] on my home network, instead of using an ad-filled app. It should let me pick a photo or PDF, choose copies and paper size, and send it. Keep it a single static page plus whatever minimal relay is needed, and explain how to host it for free.
A starting prompt written by Agents in the Wild. Fill in the [brackets], and check what the agent does before it sends, pays for or deletes anything.
Days or months after highlighting a line, it appears on the display on their dresser. Claude Code wrote the backends for the e-ink screens, showing a random quote with its book cover, 100% local.
Recipes from photos, nutrition from the USDA, a weekly plan and shopping list. Their meal data showed they already get most vitamins, and 2 weeks of symptom logs point to tomatoes as a first suspect.
The recovered files were malformed. Claude Code helped work out that each was a metadata header, a thumbnail and the real image stuck together, then wrote a script that split them, metadata intact.
About 15k pages of discovery stood between a solo practice and a summary judgment motion. Claude ran OCR, built embeddings and search scripts, then found evidence for each assertion, with traces to check.
Markdown files should just open, so they asked Claude Code for a viewer. It opens instantly: faster, they say, than any other macOS app, and faster than Bitwarden's Chrome extension shows its fill menu.
Migrating a password reset flow, Claude Code and Opus produced code on par with a mid level developer. It needed close supervision throughout, and cost roughly 2 months of Pro subscription for about half a day's work.