Dev built a interruptible AI history podcast app with 80% of code by Claude Code
Goldenchild123 · reddit · 2026-10-12
A history-loving developer spent months building Historai: type any historical topic, moment, or person, and about a minute later two AI hosts deliver a web-researched episode with sources and accompanying artwork. You can interrupt mid-episode with questions—the hosts answer and pick the story back up—and opt into a quiz at the end.
How it was built
- Roughly 80% of the code came from Claude Code, with the front end from Claude Design. The author steers ideas and design, reviews every feature, and inspects anything risky before shipping.
- He used Sol/Astra to run Claude and GPT models against each other on the same design problems, letting them iterate and cover each other's blind spots.
Multi-model bake-off findings
- Every job (research/planning, scriptwriting, artwork selection, voices, quiz) was benchmarked across GPT, Claude, and Gemini; models are pinned per task, not per app.
- Opus 4.8 was the clear winner as the writer—better dialogue and pacing, and honest about conflicting sources. Counterintuitively, the newer Opus 5.5 wrote more generic scripts.
- Lessons: bake-offs beat intuition (his guesses were wrong repeatedly), costs differ widely, and review—not typing—consumes most of the time.
Try it at historai.ca.
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