Code Graffiti
I am a product designer, not a coder, comfortable with HTML and CSS and no-code tools like Webflow and Framer, but backend terms like APIs and databases still lose me. Early in 2025 I started tracking protein, fiber, and sugar to keep my body in shape, and my partner and I use Purple Carrot for dinner, but its site made it hard to pick meals fast against my own goals.
The Canvas
Purple Carrot shows most of its macro numbers only on nutrition label images, one click at a time, and I had several things to sort by at once: high protein, no added sugar, high fiber. Checking meals against all three turned a five-minute task into a twenty-minute hunt, so instead of accepting the site's limits, I decided to paint over them myself. I call this practice Code Graffiti.
The Paint
I opened Claude and VS Code, turned on Plan Mode, and asked Claude to interview me, then told it to ask the questions I hadn't thought to ask myself. Claude built a local tool over my Purple Carrot account, pulling in menu data and filtering it against my own rules, then I polished it further with custom instructions in Markdown files, treating them like a small design team of my own.
The Tag
In a few hours I fixed a problem I had lived with for weeks and built a tool I still use every week. The real win was not the tool. It was the shift in how I saw the problem. Products are no longer closed. If a platform gets you 90% of the way, you can build the last 10% yourself.