I’ve been using Claude Code (and more recently Codex) to build a tool for comparing AI photo editors, and thought I’d share a few things that worked really well for someone coming at this pretty new to coding. I’m a photographer, and we do a lot of editing in Lightroom. There are now quite a few AI tools like Imagen, Aftershoot, Neurapix and FotoLab that promise to learn how you edit, and then automatically edit thousands of images for you. The problem is… how do you actually know which one is best? Most comparisons are before/after pictures, often from sponsored reviews, and that doesn’t really tell me how much time I’ll save when I’ve got 30,000 images to edit over the course of a year. So I built a benchmark that compares the actual Lightroom slider adjustments from different AI editors against my own finished edits. It calculates things like how many images are ready to deliver without touching them again, how accurate the individual sliders are, and whether the AI is actually beating a simple preset. A few things I learned building it: Claude Code is really good at implementing something when I already know what I want. Less so at deciding what would actually be useful. The metrics were probably the hardest part of the whole project, and I ended up spending a lot of time thinking these through myself. Sketching interfaces on paper is ridiculously effective. I drew the graphs I wanted, took photos with my phone, and fed them in. Claude did a surprisingly good job of translating these into a working interface. I don’t know all the UX terminology, so being able to just draw it was a massive help. Getting the architecture right beforehand made a big difference. I wanted this to be free to host, with no backend, and for people’s Lightroom catalogs to stay on their own computers. Ended up with React + TypeScript, reading SQLite directly in the browser. I’ve switched between Claude Code and Codex during development. Both have been pretty good, although I still use ChatGPT quite a lot for researching approaches before I start building. It’s not a particularly beautiful application. It feels a bit like an Excel workbook, which is more or less what I wanted. The graphs and results matter much more to me than the interface looking fancy. The application is free/open source, and I put some example results on there too. Demo: https://limeclub99.github.io/LR-tool-compare/ GitHub: https://github.com/LimeClub99/LR-tool-compare I think my main takeaway has been that the better I understand the problem before asking Claude to do anything, the better the results. Which might sound obvious… but it really became apparent with this project. But absolutely love that Claude has made stuff like this possible. submitted by /u/Grand-Lie-8964
Originally posted by u/Grand-Lie-8964 on r/ClaudeCode