My son caught a spider. So I used AI to build him an explorer club.

A few weeks ago my son Finn came downstairs holding a glass jar. The spider he'd caught for show and tell had laid eggs. He wanted to build her a home. I opened Claude and asked my favorite question: "Help me think expansively about this."

What came out of it is Finn's Explorer Club. It's a picture book I read to him at bedtime, starring Finn, his little sister Nora and Cami, a black chameleon with purple hair that Finn designed himself. The stories follow what we're really doing that week. Claude also finds what we need to buy (from shops that actually deliver to us in Portugal), what we can find outside, and places nearby we can go.

One Saturday we spent the whole day in a forest looking under rocks. Finn found a small brown spider in a dried-out riverbed and named him Chris Webb. We built his house that afternoon with a step-by-step guide in the app. That evening's story was about him.

I'm not an illustrator, a primary school teacher or an app developer. A few years ago an idea like this would have stayed an idea. I built most of it from my phone over a weekend and a few evenings. It really does feel like our biggest limitation now is our own creativity and imagination.