Claude Code in a Trenchcoat

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When the Every staff convened after the holiday break, the biggest topic of conversation was personal projects. It wasn’t just our team that was tinkering around; on X, there was an explosion of people who used the downtime to take their first steps with Claude Code and other AI tools, build projects they’d always dreamed of realizing, and even convert a few parents and grandparents in the process. Given that AI tools are often still tightly limited in corporate settings, these personal wins are a key way that this tech spreads and people become advocates in the workplace. As Monologue general manager Naveen Naidu wrote in a personal essay reflecting on his 2025 odyssey: Your side project could become your whole new direction. Here are a couple of our favorite holiday builds:

A home base for record collectors

“I made DIG—short for ‘Discover In Grooves’—after taking Every’s Claude Code for Beginners course. I had zero coding experience, but I started building anyway. I’m a vinyl record collector, and I’ve always been frustrated by how fragmented the experience is—new releases scattered across subreddits, blogs, Instagram, disconnected tools. DIG is my attempt to fix that: one hub for discovery, tracking, collecting, and a social layer, with Claude-powered features that don’t exist yet.

I learned by doing—getting my hands dirty in Claude Code, deploying to Vercel, wiring up Spotify and Discogs APIs. A year ago, I never would’ve thought I could do any of that. The hardest part has been knowing when to stop. With vibe coding, there’s always something new to add. At some point, you have to ship.