Custom illustrated bedtime stories their kids love, from $0.25 a book
Claude writes the story page by page, with the tension planned to peak in the middle, and Gemini draws it in a consistent style. Their kids love them night after night.
Done withClaudeGeminiSpotted· by HN user cowlby· Oct 17, 2026
Result Stories their kids love night after night
“I've found that by putting meaningful effort into AI storytelling, I can create bespoke stories that my kids love night after night.”
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
They use Claude with structured output to write a story page by page, passing in a story arc as a set of emotional-beat values so the pacing hits a crisis and then resolves. For each page they have Claude write the text and an illustration prompt, plus an overall “art direction” description, then feed all of that into Gemini Nano Banana Pro to generate consistent illustrations.
How it went
Putting meaningful effort into the AI storytelling process lets them create bespoke stories that their kids love night after night, at a cost of about $0.25 to $0.50 per book, which they say is worth it for the quality.
Try it yourself with Claude
Have Claude write a children's story page by page as structured output, feeding it a story arc as a set of emotional-beat values per page so the pacing builds and resolves properly. For each page, also generate an illustration prompt and an overall art-direction guide, then pass those into Gemini to create consistent illustrations across the whole book, personalized with your own kid's name and interests.
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.
An old printer stopped working with MacOS 27. Claude wrote new drivers, using its owner as eyes and hands: did grayscale work, did page 1 print at lower DPI, now reload the paper for duplex. Then it printed again.
Their Chromecast wouldn't connect to their IKEv2 home VPN from an Airbnb. Told to fix it, Claude found no way to make the existing VPN apps work, so it wrote a new client. About 20 minutes, plus their certs.
Amazon support couldn't figure out the URL for an account question and wanted to escalate with a phone call instead. Gemini gave the URL and explained what was needed in one reply. ChatGPT got it right too.
Their new boiler acted up. They sent Gemini photos and asked for help; it turned out to be user error, nothing safety-critical, and the plumber call-out was saved.
Devialet's official app was abandoned. Claude and Codex reverse engineered the amplifiers' private protocol and built an iOS controller in about a day of work. Without AI, they'd never have started.
A Santa hat, a hidden Bluetooth speaker and a cloned voice reading lines Claude wrote. At Christmas it sorted the kids, and declared a cheeky niece "Slytherin!!!"