happy new year!

lets start 2026 with some financial literacy..

i saw this video on reels and it cemented an idea i've had for a while to get a better view on my american express transactions with a fun spin on it.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by shea durazzo (@sheadurazzo)

it’s been tested for the UK and Mexico, other countries may not work, but if you run into any issues and would be happy to help let me know and we can get it fixed. 

you can try the site out here:

Amex Wrapped - Your Year in Spending

Beautiful visualizations of your Amex spending. 100% private - data never leaves your browser.

Your Year in Spending

and see the source code here:

GitHub - 12-days-of-shipmas-2025/day-5-amex-wrapped: Amex Wrapped - Your year in spending visualized. 100% private, client-side processing.

Amex Wrapped - Your year in spending visualized. 100% private, client-side processing. - 12-days-of-shipmas-2025/day-5-amex-wrapped

GitHub12-days-of-shipmas-2025

So I wanted to find streams of the various new years today and when searching I ran into a lot of spam which was frustrating.

I found a BBC stream in the end that covered most but not all of the countries.

For todays ship I wanted to make a little site for this, it's a simple github pages site so free to host forever.

NYE 2026 Global Fireworks Timeline

Watch New Year’s Eve celebrations as they happen around the world. Live fireworks from Auckland to Las Vegas.

New Year StreamNew Year Stream

I think it's nice enough for what I wanted and next year I may plan it more and make it better as I think it would be useful - I was genuinely disappointed how there wasn't nice sites aggregating things.

If I'm wrong and I just didn't find one due to google search / youtube search being bad please let me know!

Regardless, happy new year and I hope that everyone is enjoying their celebrations.

See you in 2026.

i'll talk some more around the privacy and ai topics around the smart glasses, but i will say that they are very nice as a decent quality POV / hands free camera which i find much more interesting than the 'ai features' - for now.

however, they are constrained by a 3 minute recording duration and until recently, no SDK to expand and explore. that has finally changed this last month:

GitHub - facebook/meta-wearables-dat-ios: Meta Wearables Device Access Toolkit for iOS

Meta Wearables Device Access Toolkit for iOS. Contribute to facebook/meta-wearables-dat-ios development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHubfacebook

the SDK lets you mock the glasses or stream directly without the 3 minute limitation.

for day 3, i've forked the repo and created a mac companion app and the ability to stream between the two.

i will work on this some more soon with the goal of performance improvements (as there's some tearing and artefacts now) and allowing the glasses to be used as a camera input on the mac for obs/video calls etc.

you can see my repo here and try it out for yourself:

GitHub - 12-days-of-shipmas-2025/day-3-metastream: Stream video from Ray-Ban Meta glasses to your Mac as a virtual camera

Stream video from Ray-Ban Meta glasses to your Mac as a virtual camera - 12-days-of-shipmas-2025/day-3-metastream

GitHub12-days-of-shipmas-2025

note: currently it needs actual glasses to trigger the video stream - i'll fix this tomorrow so it can use the video demo mode - going to sleep now :)

i'll write something around the ethics of ai art generation some other day, but to be frank, a lot of what is needed for corporate or personal media is pretty low value and wouldn't be a nice time for the artist nor the commissioning party.

as such, while i keep my writing human i'm very fine with image generation for infographics and miscellaneous things, it's crazy what you can prompt into existence.

while i was working on the ghost theme yesterday, i wanted to populate my demo 12 days with posts and i needed images for testing, so i made my day 2 deliverable a small MCP server:

(you can paste the below into Claude Code and it will install it for you)

Install: npx -y image-generation-mcp

https://www.npmjs.com/package/image-generation-mcp

You'll need to get an API key from google ai studio and save it in a .env

https://aistudio.google.com/app/api-keys

The MCP is open source and was designed so that it can be extended with more AI Image providers, feel free to review and contribute here if you'd like:

GitHub - 12-days-of-shipmas-2025/day-2-image-generation-mcp

Contribute to 12-days-of-shipmas-2025/day-2-image-generation-mcp development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub12-days-of-shipmas-2025

I also found that my MCP got indexed here:

Score | Image Generation MCP

View compliance and best practices scores for Image Generation MCP. Check documentation status, licensing, available tools, security assessment, and verification details for this MCP implementation.

Glama – MCP Hosting PlatformOm-Shree-0709

I'll investigate this another day.

ciao :)

one more thing.. this one i found quite profound:

Image Generation Details

Prompt:
 A surreal, absurdist scene of a robot artist having an existential crisis while painting. The robot is surrounded by floating blog post thumbnails and social media images it has created, but they’re all melting like Dali clocks. In the background, a giant glowing API key floats in the sky like a monolith from 2001 Space Odyssey. The robot holds a paintbrush but its arm is made of code and JSON brackets. Vaporwave color palette with pink and cyan gradients, retro 80s grid floor, glitch art effects. Text-free, moody lighting, cinematic composition.

Format: twitter-post

Title: When your MCP generates images but questions its own existence

Style: vaporwave, surrealist, glitch art, retro-futurism

The tool used was mcp__image-gen__generate_blog_image and it was called at timestamp 2025–12–29T23:08:19.632Z, with the result returned at 2025–12–29T23:08:27.754Z.

Maybe this is a sign of reaching unc status but I remember when Apple used to give you 12 days of little free things - apps, movies, music - every Christmas.

Why did Apple pull its free Christmas app giveaway?

Free is a much more complicated word for Apple nowadays, and the company doesn’t seem bothered about giveaways

The IndependentAndrew Griffin

To wrap up a year of intense AI assisted development, what better way to ship some apps and share the process along the way.

I will of course be restricted by the Apple App review process for iOS apps, but we'll get some things to TestFlight (public beta testing) and hopefully on the store by the end of the 12 days.

On request (editing takes time), I'll publish the full process, including simple websites, custom domains and app store submission.

I have some other non-iOS projects planned too so let's see where the days take us.

If you have anything you'd like to request let me know with the chat bubble, a comment or reach out on x :)

Day 1 - Shipmas Ghost Theme

Day 1: Shipmas Ghost Theme

🚢🎄

humanwritten.ai🍋

Day 2 - Image Generation MCP

Day 2: Image Generation MCP

graphic design is not my passion

humanwritten.ai🍋

Day 3 - metastream

Day 3: metastream

stream your meta smart glasses to your mac

humanwritten.ai🍋

Day 4 - New Year Stream

Day 4: newyearstream.com

happy new year! 🥳🍾

humanwritten.ai🍋

Day 5 - Amex Wrapped

Day 5: Amex Wrapped

your financial year in review

humanwritten.ai🍋

Day 6 - ???

Day 7 - ???

Day 8 - ???

Day 9 - ???

Day 10 - ???

Day 11 - ???

Day 12 - ???

So to kick off shipmas i needed to make a format for my blog powered by Ghost + Magic Pages.

This theme was put together with Claude Code but it took longer than I would have liked as the Ghost theme editing process wasn't the most fun.

The theme creates a time-boxed 12 days UI that will show on the site from December til the end of January and uses tags to associate posts to each day.

An additional tag can be used to archive the posts after January so that this theme can be used yearly.

If you would like to join for the 12 days of shipmas, you can sign up for a ghost blog via magic pages here (affiliate) - free for 14 days with no credit card needed.

Magic Pages

Get your Ghost CMS publication up and running in no time with Magic Pages’ Ghost CMS web hosting – starting at $6/month!

Magic Pages

Setup Instructions

After you sign up you can add the 12 days of shipmas theme by uploading this .zip:

Once you upload the theme, you can import this page template so you have all of the pages and tags pre-populated for you:

It should now look like this:

Here's a fully populated demo site I made for testing to see how it will look:

shipmas

12 days of shipmas

shipmaslemon

If you choose to take part, let us know over on x :)

optional - you can add the 12 days to the menu bar as it will hide from the home page automatically after January 31

You can view the theme source code here if you'd like to inspect:

GitHub - 12-days-of-shipmas/shipmas-ghost-theme: A Ghost theme featuring a 12 Days of Shipmas countdown grid with dark mode support

A Ghost theme featuring a 12 Days of Shipmas countdown grid with dark mode support - 12-days-of-shipmas/shipmas-ghost-theme

GitHub12-days-of-shipmas

If you would like to see some behind the scenes content of creating this or request an app for one of the 12 days, leave a comment or reach out on x and let me know.

hey!

you most likely haven't read anything from me as i haven't had much time to actually post this year.

i've been busy experimenting and building alongside my day job, and who would have guessed it, actually writing instead of generating ai articles is pretty time consuming.

however, i'd like to get through and publish the many (100+) drafts that i have accumulated over this year and i'm excited to write more consistently.

to kick this off, i'm going to be doing a #12daysofshipmas where i will release something everyday for the next 12 days.

read more about it in my kickoff post here:

The 12 Days of Shipmas

What apple took away I’d like to bring back :)

humanwritten.ai🍋

with day 1 released now (if you'd like to join in):

Day 1: Shipmas Ghost Theme

🚢🎄

humanwritten.ai🍋

sign up to be notified when each app releases :) - and if you've got an app request please reach out!

I thought we would be cutting through AI generated slop, but it seems that the leading companies are piping out actual products at a record pace.

OpenAI (ChatGPT)

Not one to be out done, OpenAI introduced Codex - an asynchronous development tool that lets you 'set and forget' tasks just days before Google IO.

I wanted to cover this on the day but unfortunately they made teams users wait for 3 days with confusing communications (and I didn't want to pay $200).

My Codex Review is in progress, meaning I've spent another $80 for this bringing my AI costs this month to ~$200, so please subscribe (80% discount, just $10 for a year).

Anthropic (Claude)

Unlimited Claude Code with Claude MAX dropped the other week, with the cadence of Claude Code updates increasing significantly since with multiple releases daily.

Just today it integrated into VS code (inc. cursor and windsurf), alongside dropping Sonnet 4.0

Pls use my referral if you subscribe :)

See my Claude Code Max review here:

Claude MAX includes Claude Code - a vibe coders paradise 🌴

Lets build an app real fast

humanwritten.ai🍋

Google (...)

Too much to cover in this highlight, check back for google deep dive in a few days.

TLDR: Glasses, AI Studio, Also Codex but make it Google (Jules), Flow Video generation.

I will highlight the end of their 100 things blog post below:

99. As Sundar shared in his opening keynote, people are adopting AI more than ever before. As one example: This time last year, we were processing 9.7 trillion tokens a month across our products and APIs. Now, we’re processing over 480 trillion — 50 times more.

100 things we announced at I/O

Learn more about the biggest announcements and launches from Google’s 2025 I/O developer conference.

GoogleMolly McHugh-Johnson

Microsoft

and Microsoft? Well they fired an employee who protested their supply of AI for military applications, along with 3% of their workforce - likely due to be replacement by Copilot.

Microsoft fires employee who interrupted CEO’s speech to protest AI tech for Israeli military

Microsoft has fired an employee who interrupted a speech by CEO Satya Nadella to protest the company’s work supplying the Israeli military with technology used for the war in Gaza

The IndependentVia AP news wire

On the flip side, they open sourced CoPilot, while at the same time investing in OpenAI, which purchased a VS code Fork (Windsurf) for 3 billion.

In parallel Cursor (also a VS code fork) has been valued at 9 Billion in the latest round of funding.

I saw this comment on the video below:

1. Hire Engineers to build product
2. Fire Engineers
3. Make product open source
4. Get the community to maintain the code
5. Profit

As always, Fireship explains it best.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe to be informed of deep dives into some of these topics over the coming weeks.

I'm still discounting 80% off for the first year for the first 100 subs, please help me out with all my AI costs!!

ciao x
🍋

... one more thing

Jonny Ive and Sam Altman are I guess - a thing?

After acquiring Jonnys' hardware start up LoveFrom, they are now introducing io, not to be mistaken with Google io, a new hardware devision for Open AI.

04.10.25 Update - video removed, have found another below but unknown how long it will be around for:

Jony Ive Deal Removed from OpenAI Site Over Trademark Suit

Marketing materials and video related to a blockbuster partnership between former Apple Inc. designer Jony Ive and OpenAI Inc. were removed from the web due to a trademark dispute.

BloombergMark Gurman

Us mortals (non-billionaires) will just have to accept that this video and photo exist now:

All jokes aside, I guess the goal is to make the Rabbit R1 but good actually. Best of luck to them. Looking forward to seeing it.

For more, read here:

https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/

As of 02.05.25 - Claude Code, Anthropic's famously good yet prohibitively expensive CLI Coding Agent has been bundled into the MAX, with two flavours, starting at 5x and 20x usage at $100 and $200 respectively.

We're going to test this out today and see how for $200 ($100 apple dev license, $100 Claude MAX) we can build and release an app to the iOS app store (pending approval) in 24 hours.

If you want to try this without spending $200, you can code exclusively through Cursor's free tier/trial and Claude's free account.

To develop for Apple you do need access to a Mac but you can experiment without paying for a full apple developer license. If you want a tutorial for this let me know in the chat bubble and I'll get around to it when i can :)

Firstly, why is this such a good deal? Well lets look at some anecdotes from reddit:

Okay, so is it really that good? Lets find out.

IDEA:

I've got a friend that DJ's and often needs to find the Tempo / BPM for the song that's playing.

There's some basic app's out there but after some brief research, they all seem either just to give a basic BPM or act more as a metronome.

So to differentiate our app we're going to add double and half time BPM values
(if you've ever mixed music you'll know the pain of 76 * 2 in a moment of panic)

EXPLORATION:

For me step 1 of vibe coding is vibe design (including iteration until an MVP brief and UI is achieved), then this creates your UI and technical brief.

The best way I've found to do this is using Claude's artefacts, you simply brief what you want, let it have some creative freedom and then give feedback and iterate.

You can view my chat for this project here, including vibe design, and vibe tech spec.

Something crucial we can't forget about is VIBE SECURITY. I'll talk about this more in the future but it's one of the biggest downfalls of AI assisted coding.

Luckily by developing for iOS, we offload essentially all security considerations to Apple (for this basic app), therefore the vibes are secure, and we don't really need to worry about it so much.

PLANNING:
Okay, so you've cooked up a UI that your happy with for your app - as in my example above, it might even be functional thanks to Claude's artefacts.

You are now ready to get a technical and UI spec to feed into Claude Code on desktop.

Amusingly, when AI generates timelines, it always generates reasonable and realistic human led timelines, so in my first spec we got the below:

This does not pass the vibe check, so we needed to give Claude a reminder:

And with that were off:

In the project plan it actually defined vibe coding quite beautifully, so lets capture that as "The Vibe Coding Manifesto"

EXCECUTION:
Now it's time to actually build. We set up a new blank Xcode project, initiate Claude Code, add the spec and let it cook until we're happy.

All in it took me 3 hours including logo creation, app store submission and feature refinement.

UPDATE: 03.05.25 - App rejected in review due to iPad usability - to resolve this I have enabled the iPad build (it was disabled - the reviewers didn't like the app at 2x with increased text size) & I have also improved some of the spacing and fixed some bugs that were found, +30 mins.

UPDATE: 04.05.25 - App is approved for the app store 🚀

REFLECTION:
In all honestly I vibe coded this badly, I committed to GIT too late and didn't rollback when errors and changes I didn't like happened.

If I had done this properly and followed the vibe coding principles, I reckon it could have been done in <1.5 hrs, but I got excited using Claude Code without each message costing me $5 and never hitting rate limits so it was a good test of Claude MAX and I regret nothing.

LEARNING:
I'll shortly post an article using the above Claude Code brief and build the app again cleaner and in tutorial form. Subscribe to be notified when this is live :)

If you've gotten this far then thanks for reading and coming along on this journey with me. If you want to see more content like this, subscribe below :)

I'm also offering 80% off for the first 50 subscribers 🎉 to the paid subscription, where I'll post more tutorials and will be open to support requested topics.

ciao x
🍋

Links & Resources (affiliate links may be included):

Claude Sign Up

Claude’s Max Plan: Expanded Access for Demanding Projects

Introducing the Max plan with higher usage limits for more collaboration with Claude. Designed for frequent users who need extended conversations, document analysis, and consistent AI assistance throughout their workday.

Using Claude Code with your Max Plan | Anthropic Help Center

Anthropic Help Center

Cursor - The AI Code Editor

Built to make you extraordinarily productive, Cursor is the best way to code with AI.

Cursor

VIBE CODING Principles:

• No meetings
• No overthinking
• Just good vibes and fast code
• "Perfect is the enemy of shipped"
• Commit often, debug later
• If at first you don't succeeded, try try again
• Energy drinks are your friend

02.05.25 - Claude + William Hickson + humanwritten.ai