projects

I've been exploring the creative potential of AI tools through a series of side projects: a web app that generates a daily animal friend, paired with an epic story or poem; an automated email outreach system that crafts personalized messages; a shared daily photo email that creates poems from memories; a Super Bowl ChatGPT ad dot-effect image generator; and this website itself.

1. Daily ZooMate web app

The idea | Inspired by my love of animals and by friends' children enjoying bedtime stories, I decided to pair the two and create a "Daily ZooMate" app that shows the user a daily animal combined with a contextual poem or tale of the animal's escapades. Try it out here!

Functionality | The user goes through a sign-up flow to create a profile and capture initial preferences (initial animal and content type). The app then shows the user their "Daily ZooMate"! The user can save or share their ZooMate, or request a new one; they can also manually change their preferred animal and content type. The user can also see their daily consecutive and total ZooMate streaks.

March 2025 (~17 hours)

Created using Lovable (code hosted on Github, backend on Supabase, deployed natively on Netlify). Debugging with o1-pro.

2. Automated personalized email outreach

The idea | Mass email outreach is impersonal and ineffective; personally crafted emails are effective but do not scale. We can leverage automation tools and LLMs to help us get the best of both worlds; plus, it's a fun way to learn more about what makes the recipient unique.

Functionality | The program takes a Google sheet with outreach information (company name and website, owner name and LinkedIn), finds interesting company facts and points of commonality between the sender and the recipient, and outputs a personalized draft outreach email, ready to send.

February 2025 (~6 hours total)

Created using Gumloop, which connects natively to the Google Sheets API, OpenAI API, Proxycurl API, and Gmail API.

3. Shared daily photo email

The idea | We capture so many photos of the moments of our lives but go back and view so few; I wanted to find a way to resurface the positive memories of the past. This "photo of the day" automation sends an email every day with a shared photo and a generated poem to me and my girlfriend, hopefully strengthening our relationship and creating a daily moment of nostalgia and fun.

Functionality | Every day, an image is randomly selected from a particular Google Photos album (that is continuously updated with fresh photos). A poem based on this image is then generated, and the image and the poem are packaged into an email, populated with myself and a recipient of my choice (my girlfriend, in this case), and sent.

November 2024 (~15 hours total)

Automation hosted on Google Apps Script, code written by Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Debugging done by ChatGPT o1 and 4o (web search functionality was critical). Leveraged Google Photos API, Gmail API, OpenAI API, Google Cloud Console.

4. ChatGPT ad maker

The idea | After OpenAI's Super Bowl ad, I saw claims on Twitter/X that a program that can generate this "dot effect" for images could be coded in less than one minute. Excited (but skeptical), I wanted to put this to the test. (I also considered the OpenAI ad quite aesthetically pleasing, and wanted to create the same effect on some of my own images).

Functionality | The program takes an uploaded image by the user and transforms it into a "dot-effect" image reminiscent of the OpenAI Super Bowl add. The user can also choose to have the dots change color for a more playful effect.

February 2024 (~a few minutes)

Code generated by o3-mini-high; code copy-pasted into TextEdit and run as a tab in Chrome.

5. This website

The idea | With so many excellent no-code and low-code tools available, I thought it would be fun to try and build a website - something I have never done before. Given I am not much of a social media user, I also thought it would be a good way to share some of the projects that I have been working on.

Functionality | I drew inspiration from the clean and minimalist designs that seem to be prevailing in the AI space, particularly Dario Amodei's website aesthetics, Grok's clean interface, and Inflection.ai's use of shape and color.

March 2025 (~5 hours for initial version; ~9 hours total for current version)