Fun side projects in building software using AI Coding tools mainly Cursor and Lovable. The goal in each case was to scratch and itch, build something useful and learn in the process. Each experiment is housed in its own Docker container running on this site. Caddy is being used to manage corresponding subdomains.
Music Discovery Map
A fun React application designed to allow users to explore musical relationships. The application was built entirely in Lovable using their backend as a service support. There are two views.
The first allows you to explore Artists using the MusicBrainz API. Enter the name of your favourite band or artist and view their discography complete with YouTube and Spotify links as well as a network graph of related bands and artists. Here’s the output for The Fall:
The second allows you to explore Genres using data from EveryNoiseAtOnce. Enter a genre and a list of artists in that genre as well as a network graph of related genres.
Raspberry Pi Christmas Tree
A festive Raspberry Pi side project that brings a Pi Hut 3D RGB LED Christmas tree to life with interactive features, including simple colour/light patterns and voice control. It includes Python code for basic LED effects and both cloud-based and fully offline voice-controlled modes that let you change colours, trigger animations, and play or generate speech using on-device speech-to-text (vosk) and text-to-speech (piper) tools, making the tree a festive, standalone, smart lighting installation. It can also tell jokes. See here for a Substack post on how it was developed.
AI News Agent
An example end to end AI agent proposition for retrieving AI news from curated sources. Comprised of a React-based frontend and FastAPI backend. The frontend manages the retrieval and viewing of news articles about AI including filtering and sorting. The backend handles the RSS fetch and generation of summaries of the articles using Perplexity MCP. It also generates indexes under filters via clustering the article content. Articles are stored in Supabase. The backend API is available here. Built using mainly Cursor with Lovable used to create the UI. The learnings from this project particularly around article topic modelling were applied in building out CxAI.
Invoice Forge
A web application for generating pdf or docx invoices from a form complete with calculation logic. Comprised of a React-based frontend and FastAPI backend. The frontend manages the input and storage of invoices in the local browser context. The backend handles formatting and generation of the invoices. The backend API is available here. Built using mainly Cursor with Lovable used to create the UI. This is an example of a capability that would typically be part of a SaaS accountancy package. It’s used to generate invoices for Diorama Consulting.