What they did
perspectivezoom kept misremembering when early girl tomatoes arrive at the farmers' market and could not find varietal-level seasonality data online. Between July 20 and September 2, 2026 he ran one Claude Opus 5 session of 731 prompts, over 22 working days, to build a Bun, React and D3 static site that renders customisable posters for San Francisco and New York. Claude wrote the code but left every change unstaged for him to review; he spent the early part of the session training it to plan small commits, work on them serially and never run git add or git commit. Claude found the USDA Market News shipping data for the SF region and reshaped it, using outbound shipments as a proxy for ripeness and smoothing one-week gaps; it proposed switching from a streamgraph to ridgeline charts when the real data turned out too spiky; and it suggested the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection for the artwork. The project has eight external dependencies.
How it went
The site is live and the full transcript is published, searchable and grouped into chapters. He credits Claude with the three decisions that define the project, the data source, the chart type and the artwork, and says the data iteration alone would have taken him five times longer and he would probably have quit halfway. He estimates he is at least twice as productive as three years ago. On the other side: far too many comments, giant components he repeatedly had to ask it to split, a new file for every extracted hook, and naming and data-model choices made in haste, such as merging responses and tool calls into one string in the transcript viewer. He still does not trust it to commit unsupervised. The original tomato question remains unanswered.
Worth knowing
He used Claude with default settings only, no CLAUDE.md, skills or hooks, and acknowledges that tuning would probably have fixed some of the quality complaints. Only two regions exist, with very different source data. Commenters could not read the chart without a legend; the lighter band means years when the crop is only sometimes good. The author mentions he is looking for work.