Making a "Daily Care Tracker" App

In An app can be a home-cooked meal, Robin Sloan wrote about “home cooked” apps:

I made a messaging app for, and with, my family. It is ruthlessly simple; we love it; no one else will ever use it. 

I am spending this week at “CatCamp,” the label Lisa and I have for staying at the house shared by my brother Mike, my sister-in-law Karen, and my mother, while Mike and Karen are away. I’m here to care for their cats, and to care for Mom.

Mike, every inch the documenter that our father was, prepared a detailed Word document outlining what needs to be done every day; things like this, about Elsie the cat:

She will have wet food first thing around 8am, and then maybe every 3 or 4 hours thereafter.

Because I’m taking most of this CatCamp solo, while Lisa and L. are away, I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss anything, so I had Claude cook up an app for me, with this prompt:

This is a Microsoft Word file that my brother Mike sent me today. They are away for a week, and I am staying in their apartment, taking care of their cats, Rover and Elsie, and taking care of my mother, who lives in the apartment downstairs. You will see that, in the Microsoft Word file, there are a variety of things that need to happen every day. Mom needs to take her medication in the morning, and at supper, the cats need to be fed, the plants need to be watered, etc. I would like you to create a simple web app – HTML, CSS, and JavaScript – that I can use, every day, to keep track of whether I’ve done these things. I would like to open up the app every day, and have the status of that days task to be presented to me. I’d like to be able to check off the tasks and have them visually displayed as having been completed, I would like the status of each task on each day to be recorded somehow in a file. I would like to be able to move back-and-forth between the days using some kind of navigation in the header.

It did exactly what I asked, on the first try:

I wanted to run the app on my iPhone, not my laptop, and so I needed a place to host it. I could have self-hosted, but Claude recommended Netlify, so I decided to try that out, as it’s free. 

Using “Netlify Drop,” I simply dropped the HTML file that Claude provided into a browser window, and was given a URL to run it from. Presto.

Perhaps this isn’t as much as a “home cooked” app, in the Sloan sense, as much as a “catered” app, inasmuch as I didn’t spend much time in front of the stove. 

I still believe in the intrinsic good of learning to use the tools, that all the good learning takes place in the iterations, the smashing your head against the wall when things are working, and figuring out why. I did that, millions of times, over a 40 year career as a coder. 

In this case, I was willing to let the robots do the work, so I could get on with washing the cats’ water bowls.