today was an interesting day with claude code. it's gotten a lot better since opus 4.5. i honestly haven't been using it because the regular chatbot experience works well, and i learned on prior versions of claude to more tightly constrain my problem descriptions to get more accurate responses. it seems that may not be necessary anymore.
since february, i have been studying for the jlpt n3 exam. i wanted claude's help to show my progress here.
there's now an about page, with a new feature for tracking my vocabulary progress, with data straight from my anki exports.
the only real trickiness here was preparing my anki deck for being displayed:
- i had an ancillary deck predating my Ankidrone collection that was throwing off metrics, claude helped me merge it into my existing decks without losing interval data.
- i was missing words from bunpro, which artificially caused my progress to appear less than it is. claude helped me to merge my bunpro progress into my existing decks, creating new cards for words i'd learned on bunpro but did not exist yet in any deck in my collection.
the real insanity is that rather than writing to the .apkg directly, it analyzed my exported collection offline, then handed me scripts that drive an anki extension's http interface — complete with a dry-run mode so i could analyze its efforts before committing to them.
this was a whole set of, "if i had to do all of this myself, it wouldn't have gotten done." yet it is.
the only other hangups were in ops; claude used a library new to my app's stack — sqlite, for reading anki .apkg files — but immediately identified the issue and patched it. i had to provide some oversight over database migrations.
i think the magic here may be that llms are good at doing stuff they've seen before and nothing here is suuuuper novel. but hey: wow.
follow my jlpt journey at /about!