I had long wanted to build a content management system to hold the snapshots of drawing I take during our life drawing sessions. Been threatening to do so for years, but where to find the time? — even using off-the-shelf solutions would take more time than I really have, or that my particular blend of ADD and autism streaks cope well with.
But we live in a different world now. Where still, *”the future is here, just not evenly distributed”* — but it does seem more distributed than before. For now.
Anyway I had finished setting up the studio after work with ten minutes to spare before people would arrive, and sat down to brief Claude Code in VSCode to build me a first draft of what I had in mind.
Written in under ten minutes, allowing a few minutes to also get through the questions I knew it would have, the brief was relatively short but dense, embedding a lot by reference to the wider constellation of my work and play. The [README repo](https://github.com/AndreClements/README), the methodology docs, the life drawing hosting sketch. A shorthand — *you’ve read my operating manual, now build something that fits inside it.*
Not long after the session I had a bespoke CMS developed according to my quirks and fancies, with a somewhat novel architecture and very little bloat. A claim system where artists can say *”I drew this”* and models can say *”I modelled for this”*, attendance streaks, session history — a kind of Strava for artistry, if Strava cared less about performance metrics and more about showing up. Not just coded but already working and tested in my local development environment, ready to publish to GitHub.
The architecture has a few interestin ideas. A `ConsentGate` that enforces consent as a structural constraint, not a after-thought checkbox. A `DignityException`. Error handling that carries an `andYet` field — honest self-critique logged alongside the catch, because some things you handle but shouldn’t pretend you’ve resolved. *”Govern via slope, not policing”* — make the right behaviour the path of least resistance.
I get a sense of vertigo from this technology.
Working with this stuff is working with machines, obviously, but it’s also working with gardens. That intersection — that’s the interesting stuff, at least to me.
If other commitments allow I’ll try to get a production instance live in beta mode over the next day or two. Right now though — parkrun then life drawing, both this morning.
PS It is published at https://github.com/AndreClements/lifedrawing