The idea
My friend Dean Skinner came to me with a simple, oddly delightful idea: a game where you listen to a car’s engine and guess the make and model from a few multiple-choice options. That’s it. That’s the game. You play it entirely by ear — and I mean that literally.
Got an app idea of your own? We’ll spend an hour building one with Claude and show you what comes out — no cost, no catch. Send us yours →
Four weekends
We built it. The first playable version of gEAR’D!! — the sounds, the guessing, the scoring — took the two of us about four weekends to build and get deployed for real people to play. Once it was live, Doug McKay kept it running and growing alongside Dean — adding features here and there, a growing library of engine sounds, and little facts about each car that turn it from a quiz into something you actually enjoy poking at. It even ribs you at the end: score low enough and it’ll offer up something like “Not bad… for a Tesla owner.”
And it’s live right now — go play it. It’s a web app, so there’s nothing to install and no app store to bother with; no account, no ads, nothing to buy. We built it because the idea made us grin, and that was reason enough.
One hour
Here’s the part that stopped me cold. I handed Claude a description of the app, a few sample sound files, and some of the car info — and it recreated gEAR’D!!, more or less, from scratch in under an hour. Not a mockup. A working version of the thing that took two people four weekends to stand up.
“More or less” is doing real work in that sentence. It wasn’t pixel-perfect, and the taste that makes gEAR’D!! fun — which sounds, which facts, how it feels to play — is still human. But the distance from “here’s the idea” to “here’s a playable version” collapsed in a way I’m honestly still adjusting to.
Which is exactly the point
The four weekends weren’t wasted. That’s where the judgment lives — the sound library, the pacing, the little touches, knowing what to keep and what to cut. What changed is that the mechanical distance from idea to working software is now measured in hours, not weekends. Senior judgment plus that kind of leverage is a different job than either one alone — the same thing I found rebuilding our own site in a weekend and building RAPID’s games with Claude.
So: throw us an idea
That’s a trick I want to run on more ideas — and I’d like yours. A mobile app. A SaaS tool for a niche you know cold. A web app of little animated dancers grooving to a library of songs. The weirder and more fun, the better.
We’ll take a few, spend an hour throwing them at Claude, and show you what comes out the other side. No promises, no strings, no invoice — just to see what an hour of senior judgment plus Claude can do with a good idea. And if one of them turns into something real? We’ll figure that part out together.