Goatpad

Think Notepad, but with goats!

It started as a joke with some friends and then I realized this was the perfect project to see far I could get with Claude without opening my IDE (which I'd wanted to try for a while with a small app)

I was pretty shocked to find that I only needed to manually intervene for: 1. Initializing the repo 2. Generating sprites - I tried a few image gen tools, but couldn't get a non-messy looking sprite to generate to my liking. I ended up using some free goat sprites I found instead (credited in the About section) 3. Uploading images/sprite sheets (raw claude code can't do this for some reason?) 4. DNS stuff

Aside from agents timing out/hanging periodically and some style hand holding, it was pretty straightforward and consistently accurate natural language coding end to end. I suspect this is in large part to replicating an existing, well documented style of app, but it was good practice for other projects I have planned.

The goats slowly (or quickly if you change modes) eat your note and if they consume more than half of it, you lose the file forever. I did this as an exercise to practice some gamelike visuals I've wanted to implement, but was surprised to find that this is actually a perfect forcing function to help me stay focused on text editor style tasks.

I tend to get distracted mid-stream and the risk of losing the file when I tab away has mitigated more than I expected.

Enjoy!