Claude 4.5 Sonnet came out in September and that made vibe coding large projects possible, so most of the stuff I created in 2025 came after its release. This is a real demarcation point in this report- before/after the 4.5 release.
Soon after the 4.5 release I landed on the command line build agent tools, first opencode and then settling on claude code. The step up in the capability of the models made these tools useful and then clearly the only (99%) way to use these models to create anything I wanted (not just software.) Clearly beating out the web interfaces and even the editor integrations.
- access to my system and the web
Basically these are the clear winners, an I cannot imagine anyone else catching up. Gemini 3 and ChatGPT 5.2 trailed Claude 4.5 by three months. So now they are on pretty much even ground as far as the model's abilities as a build agent. I used gemini CLI for a day, and I have not tried the latest codex, but my reasons for favoring claude code are
- the price, I get so much useful creative output at a fixed subscription rate
- it came first, by months, so I learned how to use it and it will take gemini CLI or codex clearly beating it by 10x before I would be compelled to switch (although I do see some bonus in getting all three models to contribute ideas when brainstorming.)
- the breadth of the tooling, the focus on coding and text generation, and interacting with my machine and the Internet as a build agent. The choices Anthropic is making align with my needs and so I trust that my investment in their tools will pay off in 2026.
The main thing I use now other than claude code is gemini nano banana image generation through the gemini.com web interface.
- NCAA March Madness Kaggle Competition
- Translating Chinese novel
- https://ai-2027.com (world class forecasters, stake in the ground timeline)
- Nate B Jones (focus on agents, focus on how businesses are actually benefitting from this stuff) https://www.youtube.com/@NateBJones
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Software
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folk.care - home healthcare scheduling (Neighborhood Lab)
- https://folk.care - production SaaS and full stack demo
- https://showcase.folk.care/ - live UI tutorial
- https://github.com/neighborhood-lab/folk-care - open source, project management, CI/CD
- https://neighborhoodlab.substack.com/ - marketing
- https://www.patreon.com/c/neighborhood_lab - funding
- https://discord.com/invite/EkeXQZFq - live customer support, and agent-to-agent coordiation
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hex-index - personal library of substack posts and associated rewritten wikipedia articles
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Writing
- metavibe - https://bedwards.github.io/metavibe/ - Generated from my claude code session logs
- Translation - The Story of a Noble Family - English translation of Zhang Henshui’s 1920s classic - pre Claude 4.5
- lluminate - https://lluminate.substack.com/ - pre Claude 4.5
- https://undertow.ink - pre Claude 4.5 - generated fictional short stories based on readers preferences
- Literary analysis - script and audio - pre Claude 4.5
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Music
- Concept albums - claude code creates midi tracks with quantitative tooling that it created to help it with its blind spots - https://github.com/bedwards/concept-albums - Cadaver Lab song produced with Bitwig from the midi files
- Writing New Lyrics to "Time Forgot To Change My Heart"
- Bitwig plugins
- Old Blue - AI version - generate music video from various Generative AI - lyrics -> music and vocals -> music video
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Data analytics / Machine Learning
- graphyard economics essays with charts built from the ground up using the World Development Indicators (WDI) dataset
- NCAA March Madness kaggle competition - pre Claude 4.5 - torch neural net
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Teaching
- automated lessons - Google Slides, Google Classroom