Hey everyone, I wanted to share what I just shipped using Claude Code, because honestly I’m still a little amazed it worked this well. The project: Exergo
- a free platform for coin collectors to document and share their collections. I wanted to have something like AstroBin but for numismatics. I collect ancient coins as a hobby, and the existing tools for managing collections are basically spreadsheets with no soul. I wanted something that puts the historical story first - what was happening when the coin was struck, what the symbols mean - and treats catalog data as secondary. And the whole need came from the fact that I have those interesting stories, but printed, stored somewhere. I was imagining that what if I can have a coin with label that will link to a page via qr code, where you can put as many (or as little) details as you want. The stack: Next.js, Supabase (database, auth, storage), deployed on Vercel. PWA-enabled, i18n infrastructure with next-intl from day one. How Claude Code was involved: Pretty much everything. I wrote a detailed vision document and a prioritized todo list, and then worked through it with Claude Code priority by priority. The full build covers: Database schema design (profiles, coins, collections, tags, comments, soft delete) Auth flow (Supabase email auth, signup with username validation) A complex tabbed coin form - 13 sections covering everything from historical context to symbolism to grading to privacy controls Media upload system (drag-and-drop images + video, Supabase Storage, client-side compression) Field-level privacy (not just “public or private collection” - individual fields like price, dealer, etc.) Label generator with PDF export and QR codes (jsPDF, client-side) - print labels for display trays that link back to the digital page Named collections with drag-to-reorder Explore/discovery page with search and filtering JSON import/export for data portability Account management with full data deletion SEO (JSON-LD structured data, OpenGraph) PWA manifest, service worker, install prompts Legal pages, error boundaries, loading skeletons That’s 16 completed priorities in the todo list, each one spec’d out in detail before building. What worked really well: The vision doc + todo combo. I spent real time writing a vision document explaining the philosophy, target users, what the platform is and isn’t. Then a detailed todo.md with priorities, file paths, component specs, query signatures - everything Claude Code needed to build each piece without losing context. Planning in Claude.ai, building in Claude Code. Consistency across a large codebase. The design language (burgundy/gold/cream, Georgia serif, museum-aesthetic) stayed consistent across every page and component. Once established early on, Claude Code maintained it without drifting. Complex features that just worked. The label generator especially - it renders live preview labels, generates QR codes via Canvas API, exports multi-page PDFs with front and back sides. The media upload with client-side image compression before upload. Drag-to-reorder with a ref-first pattern to avoid stale closures. These aren’t trivial things, and they came together cleanly. What needed attention: Long context across sessions. The codebase grew, and between sessions Claude Code doesn’t remember what happened last time. The todo.md and a CLAUDE.md file with project conventions were essential. It is worth investing in those documents. Getting deployment right. Some middleware issues with Vercel needed manual debugging. Knowing when to spec vs. when to let it build. Early priorities I over-specified. Later ones I learned to describe the intent and constraints and let Claude Code figure out the implementation. I’m not a professional developer. I could not have built this without Claude Code. But I also couldn’t have built it without spending real time on the planning documents. The combo of clear intent + AI execution is genuinely powerful, and I believe that it saved me A TON of tokens and unnecessary iterations. The result: A fully functional, deployed web application at exergo.org that I will be using for my own coin collection. To be honest - I may be the only user, this is such a niche field, but I got EXACTLY what I wanted. And my whole cost was just the domain ($7.50). (maybe I could approach some museums and offer them using it, it is real shame to see a rows of so interesting coins having just dates added to them, but we will see) submitted by /u/scyth1
Originally posted by u/scyth1 on r/ClaudeCode
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