I use Apple Notes to capture all kinds of things. Along with Gmail it's my digital brain. My favorite Quotes folder has 836 notes. My Insights folder has 809. And I have many other folders I keep my notes, insights and inspirations in. I've been searching for a way to review these gems regularly and had an idea.
I would love to get an "Evening Report" every night with my favorite quotes and insights before I go to bed. Then instead of getting stressed and anxious scrolling through Twitter I can review positive, inspiring things before I go to sleep.
I love Replit and have built many projects with it. I've been looking for a project to build something and learn how Claude Code works, and this was perfect - small enough to get my head around and learn these new tools, and something I will really use every day.
So I started in Claude with the prompt:
Claude came back with a full analysis of the situation (how to get data out of Apple Notes, how to write the script in Python, use launchd instead of cron, best approaches for sending the email, proposed project structure, ...), and even gave me the sentence I need to type into Claude Code:
You could literally tell Claude Code: "Build me a Python script that reads random markdown files from configured folders and emails them to me" and iterate from there.
So that's what I did.
My Experience with Claude Code
My first experience with Claude Code was impressive. It came up with a folder structure, an initial format for the "Evening Report" and even a preview capability so I could see what the report looks like during development before sending any emails. It was easy to review the project structure and the code since I set up Claude Code inside of VS Code.
It took a few iterations and specific instructions to get the formatting right - it started some some plain vanilla formatting and I wanted something more elegant - something that looked like parchment or an old book, so we went back and forth to get some details and formatting right. We had to fix some bugs and work out a few details, but overall it took less than two hours.
Building in Claude Code vs Replit
Building in Claude Code was different than building in Replit. Working in Claude Code I felt closer to the code itself. It was right in my face the entire time, and I found it really easy to go back and forth from the prompts/output to the code to review changes.
In Replit, you can also see the code but I usually find myself working at a more abstract level and don't review the code as much as I should. But Replit is great because deploying your app is literally the push of a button. For this particular project, it runs on my Mac so I didn't need to deploy to the cloud.
Going forward I will be using both - Replit allows me to move faster with ideas to test and try things and instantly put them in front of people to get feedback (easy deploy). I see Claude Code as being useful for developers who want to work more closely with each code change. I'm still exploring what you can do in Claude Code - for example they just released Skills - which sound very compelling and I will be experimenting with that next.
If you are not playing with tools like Replit, Claude Code, Lovable, etc. you are really missing out. They are remarkable - they remind me of when I first discovered computers and got hooked on exploring and building cool things.
The Result: My Evening Report!
Here's what my evening report looks like now:
I get my report every night at 10pm, and I love it. It helps me review my favorite quotes, insights and ideas I've captured, and take-aways from books I've read. I can add any of my folders to it, and I love being refreshed by these positive things before bed at night. It helps me spend less time on socials like Twitter/X and wow do I feel and sleep better.
What about you? Have you used Claude Code or Replit to build with yet? If so what did you make?