I vibe-coded a book for my family.

My husband and I had our children via surrogacy.

Every month since our daughter was born, I've told them the story of how they came to be.

It's designed to be a story that will make sense to young children, but where their understanding of the implications of key details will blossom as they mature.

Before Christmas this year, I decided to make a book version with AI illustrations.

I created an empty git repo and booted up Claude Code.

I told it the background and also dictated the story as it currently existed.

I told it my goal was to create a physical book that any of the women who were our surrogates would feel honored by.

Then, I just iterated with it, talking back and forth as it got stuck.

It helped me workshop the text, split it into spreads, come up with illustration concepts for each spread, generate images based on reference photos of each of us I gave it, and even created a workflow to tweak images iteratively.

Then it figured out which book providers were best reviewed and the dimensions and requirements of the PDFs.

Now my children's most prized possession is a high quality physical book about their story, and how the gifts of a handful of wonderful women helped make our family whole.

I'm extremely proud of the result.

I'd be more proud if I had somehow done every step myself without AI… but then again, if I couldn't have used AI I just never would have done it.

You can use Claude Code to Simply Do Things–and meaningful things, too!

Claude Code is a much better window into what the AI future will bring than ChatGPT.