How this visually impaired engineer uses Claude Code to make his life more accessible | Joe McCormick

Joe McCormick is a principal software engineer at Babylist who lost most of his central vision due to a rare genetic disorder right before starting college. He pivoted from mechanical engineering to computer science and now leads AI enablement at Babylist. Joe demonstrates how he uses AI to build micro Chrome extensions that make his everyday work and life more accessible, showing how personal software can address accessibility needs that mainstream products often overlook. What you’ll learn: How to build custom Chrome extensions in under 25 minutes using Claude CodeA practical workflow for creating AI-powered accessibility toolsHow to use Claude Skills to accelerate repetitive development tasksTechniques for making Claude Code more screen reader accessibleWhy personal software is becoming increasingly viable with AI assistanceHow multimodal AI is transforming accessibility for visually impaired users— Brought to you by: Tines https://tines.com/howiai—Start building intelligent workflows today — Detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: • How I AI: Building Custom AI Accessibility Tools for Slack with Joe McCormick & Claude Code: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/custom-ai-accessibility-tools-for-slack-claude-code • Build a Slack Link Summarizer from Scratch using Claude Code: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/slack-link-summarizer-using-claude-code • Create a Fast, Accessible AI Spell Checker for Any Website: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/accessible-ai-spell-checker-for-any-website • Build a Custom AI Tool to Describe Images in Slack: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/ai-tool-to-describe-images-in-slack — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Joe and his background (02:34) Joe’s journey into computer science after vision loss (04:50) The concept of personal software for accessibility (06:09) Demo of image description Chrome extension for Slack (10:40) Demo of AI-powered spell checker extension (13:12) The efficiency of keyboard shortcuts for accessibility (14:37) Live building a link summarization extension (20:28) Using Claude Skills to extract common patterns (25:30) Reviewing and modifying the development plan (27:45) Removing cognitive friction for users through repeating patterns (31:40) How to get fluent with AI tools (34:55) Loading the extension into Chrome in developer mode (36:19) Testing and debugging the extension (40:44) Quick recap (42:12) Lightning round and final thoughts — Tools referenced: • Claude Code: https://claude.ai/code • VS Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/ • Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/ • ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/ • Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses: https://www.meta.com/smart-glasses/ — Other references: • Chrome Extensions Documentation: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/ • ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA • Windows Subsystem for Linux: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/ • Screen Readers: https://www.afb.org/blindness-and-low-vision/using-technology/assistive-technology-products/screen-readers • Claude Skills explained: How to create reusable AI workflows:https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/claude-skills-explained — Where to find Joe McCormick: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joemccormickjr/ Company: https://www.babylist.com/ — Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Right before I started college, I ended up losing most of my central vision due to a rare genetic disorder called Lieber's hereditary optic neuropathy. I was talking with someone who was losing their sight recently from the same disease. And they were asking about different things. And I was like, oh, you can just do all of that now. Which Gemini or ChatGPT, the world is a whole lot easier.

• 0:18Claire Vo?

  So you're going to show us some of the things that you've built for yourself.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  So when someone sends me an image, I use this tool to be able to get the gist of an image without needing to ask somebody to explain it to me. If I hit Ctrl Shift D on any message, it's going to pop up and go off and describe that image for me. And the cool thing is I can go ask some follow ups. What age child is this for? And it will head off to ChatGPT and get the response for this as well.

• 0:44Claire Vo?

  I'm curious for you, what are you most excited about in the multimodal world of AI?

• 0:49Speaker 00

  One thing that I was always afraid of, can I read stories? I can memorize stories, I can tell stories, but your son being like, I want to read this book. And you having to be like, sorry, I can't. And now that sorry, I can't becomes sorry, I can with the assistance of so many different tools now.

• 1:05Claire Vo?

  Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Voe, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have Joe McCormick, Principal Software Engineer at Babylist, who has a vision impairment and he's going to show us how he uses AI to build micro Chrome apps to make his everyday life and work a lot more accessible. You're going to learn how to use Claude code to write Chrome apps. And you're going to be inspired at the little things you can do to make your own Slack a little bit more efficient. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Tines, the intelligent workflow platform powering the world's most important work. Business moves faster than the systems meant to support it.

• 1:47Claire Vo?

  Teams are stuck with repetitive tasks, scattered tools and hard to reach data. AI has huge promise, but struggles when everything underneath is fragmented. Tines fixes that. It unifies your tools, data and processes in one secure, flexible platform, blending a jet-tick AI, automation and human-led intervention. Teams get their time back, workflows run smarter and AI actually delivers real value. Customers now automate over 1.5 billion actions every week.

• 2:21Claire Vo?

  Tines is trusted by companies like Canva, Coinbase, Databricks, GitLab, Mars, and Reddit. Try Tines at tines.com/HowIAI. Joe, thanks for joining How I AI. And I want you to spend a little bit of time introducing yourself and your story and how AI has impacted your ability to do work and build interesting things and engage in lots of awesome projects. And what's different about your life now with AI versus before?

• 2:58Speaker 00

  So yeah, my name is Joe McCormick. I'm a principal software engineer at Babylist. And I think I took maybe a little more interesting journey than most into the computer science world. So right before I started college, I ended up losing most of my central vision due to a rare genetic disorder called Lieber's scarereditary optic neuropathy. And so before starting at Harvard, I was more interested into the mechanical world and kind of robotics and everything in that space. And then found that that was a lot harder and doing things with my hands was becoming a lot harder month after month. And so I took the intro to computer science course at Harvard and immediately fell in love and found that I got the same feeling of creativity

• 3:42Speaker 00

  and being able to come up with an idea and make it happen. But now I was on maybe on a full equal plane to my competitors at that time or my other students. But then obviously as AI took off, became even more equivalent. And the gap between, I think, software engineer for a sighted person, individually impaired person is is closing day by day. And also in my personal life, I think it's even been extra impactful. I was talking with someone who was losing their sight recently from the same disease. And they were asking about different things. And I was like, oh, you can just do all of that now with sharing your your screen with Gemini or ChatGPT, whereas when I was first losing my sight, it was using different identification tools or or even like glasses and things.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  And it's like, no, the world is a whole lot easier. I'm an avid meta glass user and and different things make my personal life a lot easier as well. But yeah, I do lots of AI product engineering now and I at Betalist lead the AI enablement in trying to make sure all of our software engineers can build AI as properly as possible at all different parts of the software development lifecycle.

• 4:51Claire Vo?

  So you figured out a way, one, to adjust your interest in engineering to something that's a little bit more accessible for you, and then, two, lean into how these AI tools can really increase the accessibility and user experience of supportive technology that you've maybe used in the past, but that you've been able to make better yourself. And what I love about this personal software moment that we're in right now, which is unfortunately, accessibility software and custom software that meets the needs of a lot of people, is simply, in some instances, not an economically viable business, for example, to build. And so in the kind of broader economic world, there's not a lot

• 5:34Claire Vo?

  of incentive to build a full set of robust tools that can meet the needs of everybody who deserves to have their needs meeting and needs met. And what I love about what we're able to do now with AI is not only are more interesting sort of accessibility tools and platforms being able to be built, but people can build these solutions for themselves and they can be very customized to your experience, your needs, your strengths. And I think that's a really underappreciated benefit of AI. And so you're going to show us some of the things that you've built for yourself, and you're actually going to walk us through your coding flow, which I think is really awesome, on how to build one of

• 6:19Claire Vo?

  these tools, so we can follow us step by step.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  For sure. So yeah, we can jump right in. I'll show off two that I built myself ahead of time, and we're going to do one on the fly. And I do think personal software is going to be huge. One reason why I like building some of these, I'm going to show off a couple of Chrome extensions that I've worked on. And one thing I like about building some of these is compared to maybe some of the offerings we have today from the AI-native browsers. A and A browsers are great, like I do use Comet. But it's it's using the Swiss Army Knife and it does everything. But in order to do that, some of its processes are definitely slower, which there are certain things that's totally fine for. But there's other steps where you want it to be really quick. And you want to use the drill instead of the little tiny screwdriver that came with this Swiss Army Knife.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  And so I'll show off a couple that I've already built. And then we'll jump into one that's not necessarily even accessibility only, but I think everyone could benefit from. So I'm going to hop into Slack now. Babylist, where I work, is a big Slack company. So lots of my stuff is very Slack based, because it's where I spend a lot of my non-coding time. I'm gonna hop in here and I'll share and show a couple of ones I've built so far. There's a little temporary Slack channel that we have for this with some example messages that were actual messages sent by my colleagues. I just had them resend it into here. So the first one I had done though is a image description tool. So when someone sends me an image, I use a screen magnifier. So I typically am looking at my screen at about 10x zoom. But it's not the easiest to do.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  And I prefer to not have to always be paying attention to that if possible. So I use this tool about to show off to be able to get the gist of an image without needing to ask somebody to explain it to me or me have to necessarily use my eyes to do it. So I have a shortcut in Slack. If I hit, I'm on Windows, so Ctrl Shift D on any message. It's going to pop up and go off and describe that image for me and tell me a little description of it. So I can see, hey, it shows a modern infant baby stroller with a car seat. It's got a canopy, it's got all details about this. And the cool thing is I can go ask some follow ups. So I can say, what age child is this for? And it will head off to ChatGPT and get the response for this as well.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  And so we can get our answers there. And it's just a nice way for me to not have to necessarily push back and work with people and get some answers to my questions as I go on this too.

• 8:47Claire Vo?

  And I think this is something that folks don't really appreciate, which is for you, you know, you have the ability to zoom in, look at this, but it's just from a time perspective, probably a lot more tedious for you to do. And so folks have thought a lot about image to description in terms of generating metadata for ecommerce sites, which I'm sure you all think about a lot. Or we had an episode with a documentary producer that highlighted using image to text descriptions plus metadata to organize archival footage a lot easier. But this is a great example of image to text being just a much more efficient information

• 9:32Claire Vo?

  transfer method for someone like you who might need to parse this information differently. And then what I love about this is you could have just done the image description, right? Just what is this image and tell me. But you actually were able to go that next step and say, great, if I need to query more information about this to understand more context, you make that really, really easy. So I love, I just, I love this example. And you, you built this all yourself?

• 9:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, this was probably 25 minutes of a Claude code session. It was, it was pretty straightforward.

• 10:04Claire Vo?

  Awesome.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  A flavor of this one I'm working on right now is a version that works in Figma directly as well, but given any Figma node will explain it to me with a much different prompt, right? In the Figma case, I want to hear about the colors of the CTAs. I want to hear about all this stuff because I am a full stack engineer. And so you can get all that out of Figma, but it's lots of clicks and lots of different steps and being able to just hit one keyboard shortcut and find out what this design is really accomplishing is going to be a nice, easy win for me. And that one is just about done as well. It's got a little bit of bugs, so it's not ready to fully demo, but that's one that I'm excited about for as well.

• 10:40Claire Vo?

  So before we go into building one of these, are there a couple other extensions that you've built just as inspiration for folks watching or listening that you think are really interesting to show?

• 10:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have another one that's not necessarily accessibility focused, but it's a cool one. So I And not the best typer in the world. I don't even think that's my vision's fault. I just, I think I'd like to think I'm a touch typer, but I think my brain goes faster than my finger sometimes. So I have one that I built that is just like a really easy spell checker. There's lots of tools that do this grammarly and all this, but similarly, they're not all screen reader accessible. They're multiple clicks away sometimes. And so I built one out that works in any input field in on the web. I'll demo it here. I'm gonna say test. Testing typos in the message.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  And then if I hit Ctrl Shift S here on this one. This is going to go off, send that off to OpenAI and come back with with that. And while it was doing that for me on my screen reader, it said like processing spell check, spell check complete. And so I know when I'm writing a message, I don't need to necessarily worry about all the polish on it. I can just do that. I hear spell check complete. I'm ready. I go off, hit that and send it off to people. And I have a prompt there that's basically like, do not change any of the words, just fix typos, like really hyper focused to make sure that it's the content that I wrote, but just with the typos corrected it.

• 12:07Claire Vo?

  So I'm leaning in and smiling a lot. One, because if you've been watching how I AI, you have heard about my fancy nails. I'm a fancy nail gal.

• 12:17Claire Vo?

  And with these fancy nails, I cannot type anything. It is all typos. And so this is such a great little workflow that you built for yourself that I'm I'm gonna steal. The two things I want to call out for people who are watching or not watching the details is you're actually running Slack right now in Chrome. So at first I was like, wait, how are all these apps interacting with the Chrome desktop app? But you're running Slack in Chrome, which means that these are all extensions that are available to you to interact with content in Slack and make modifications via a Chrome extension. So I think that's a really interesting hack for folks that are like, okay, I can't hack my way into the desktop app.

• 13:01Claire Vo?

  But I can load Slack in the browser and then on top of that add a browser extension.

• 13:11Claire Vo?

  That can do these interesting things for me. The second thing I love is how you're using so many keyboard shortcuts to trigger these micro apps. And again, this is about efficiency. I always say in these AI products, that latency is the killer feature. And so anything you can do from a UX perspective, or from a performance perspective to make these little apps more efficient, the better they're going to feel. And so I love that you, you know, type a couple of keys and you get a fully corrected sentence here, right in your browser. It's a great idea.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, the first version I had of this was just using the like ChatGPT alt space shortcut that would open up that little like mini ChatGPT window. And I had like a saved just custom GPT to do it. And then I was like, well, why am I jumping out of where I might actually working? I can, I can save two steps in like three, three clicks here. And so I think it's almost like piloting it first without doing this and then realizing, oh yeah, there's a better way. And I think one thing I prefer from software is the return on investment became so much faster. Like before you'd have an idea like that, you'd be like, this is going to save me like three minutes a day, but it's going to take me three days to build. So the payback period is just not totally there. And now it's like, it saves me three minutes a day. And it takes me 30 minutes to build. Like the payback period has just become insane for a lot of this tooling.

• 14:32Claire Vo?

  I, I love it. So let's build one. I want to see what your flow is for actually building one of these things.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. So before we build it, I'm going to talk about what I want to build. So one thing that comes up a lot in, in the babyless Slack world and probably in many other company slacks is people send links all the time.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  And for me, I often just hit like the save for later button. And then maybe at the end of the week, I like decide if I want to read them. But I've realized that like, I maybe it's the, the, do the thing that takes you one minute in a moment instead of keep deferring it. I think it'd be great if there was an easy shortcut where I could have an AI go off and fetch this article. Give me the key takeaways and then I'll decide, do I want to actually do a full read and save it for later? Or do I just skip it in the moment? And have that all work in under five to 10 seconds. I think it's a much more powerful than deferring and having this big to do list at the end of the week when I want to catch up on all these messages.

• 15:25Claire Vo?

  So you're going to show us how, how you built this. And what I have to say is all of us are so overwhelmed with so much context and links and docs. And yeah, you know, I would see something like this, whether it's A partner or a competitor or just something somebody found that was interesting. And you want to go, oh yeah, I should definitely read that. But should you? Should you definitely read it? So this quick summarization is a great idea. And so you're going to walk us through how to actually code this up using Claude code, I believe.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I'll jump in along the way with a couple like Claude code tweaks that I've made, or at least lean into to try and make it a little more screen reader accessible. But again, I similarly think that lots of things that are good for screen readers probably are going to be good tools for everybody across the board.

• 16:12Claire Vo?

  Great.

• 16:13Speaker 00

  So let's, let's jump right in. So I'm going to switch over to my terminal for just a second so I can initialize our project. So I'm going to run a make dir command to get our repo set up.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  So we have our Slack summary extension on making that directory. And I'm just going to open up Claude code quick on this. Or should I open up VS code on this? So VS code opening and initializing here. I'm going to open it up as big as I can. And we are going to jump in as this finishes loading. So I'm going to start here by making a PRD like every good How AI Podcast goes.

• 16:53Claire Vo?

  That's exactly right.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  And I'm going to do this with audio. So sometimes I'll use Whisper Flow for what I'm doing. But in this case, I actually find the VS code Copilot audio to be pretty good. And so if I'm just doing something kind of quick like this, I'll just end up using the Copilot integration. So you'll see I can do Ctrl I. And then when I hit Ctrl I again, it's going to dictate. So I'm not going to, I'm going to pause my talking and then switch in that mode. And I'm just going to dictate out for us a little bit of this PRD and then see what it comes up with for us. We want to build a simple PRD for a locally run Chrome extension. Whose job is it to exist in Slack alone? And when focused on a Slack message, you can hit the keyboard shortcut,

• 17:40Speaker 00

  Ctrl, Shift, 1, and it will search that message to find any external links. If there are external links found, it should open them up in hidden tabs, extract their content and send it off to OpenAI to summarize. And we'll see here, I just finished that. It's going to go off and quickly generate a small PRD for that. This doesn't take very long at all. I'm going to accept all the changes because I find reading in that diff view to be particularly painful with a screen reader. It's not like terrible, but it's much easier just to read it in the document. And since it's a new document being made, I'll now look at it here and we'll see how this looks. So we have our goals, we want privacy, security makes sense.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  That's the user stories here, there's some function requirements, kind of parse, it's all is making sense so far. It's non-functional and some out of scope. Images, I already demoed my image processing and so open questions. All right, where and how should we summarize, makes sense. We don't need success metrics for this, it's internal. So let's answer some of these questions. So let's just select it all and add it. I'm going to dictate again, so I can click for I, I'll start. We want to build a very simple PRD here for a locally run Chrome extension. Where the job is when in Slack in Chrome and hovering over a message that has focus.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  You can run the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl, Shift, one. And that will look for any external links in the message. If any are found, open them up in hidden tabs and extract that content and send it over to OpenAI. When in OpenAI, we should summarize them and extract three to five key takeaways from the article. And return those to the user in a fully screen reader accessible modal. Which includes the article's title and a link out in a new tab to view the article. Okay, we now have this generating the PRD. So we can see it talks to our keyboard shortcut, it's got our goals.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Minimize user effort, extreme accessibility is key for this, some basic user stories, some function requirements.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Cool. This looks good.

• 19:55Claire Vo?

  And one thing I have to call out here is you're an engineer and that was a pretty good product description and that resulted in a pretty good PRD. So, one of the things I like about AI is, as I say, there are no lanes. If you are an engineer and you have an idea, you can write a very good PRD using a little bit of AI assistance. If you need a tip, I know one or two tools that can help you with it.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. And this is no, yeah, no custom PRD prompts or anything like that. This is just mostly the foundational models work here.

• 20:28Claire Vo?

  Yep.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  Cool. So now we're going to hop into a new tab, spin up Claude code in here. And ahead of this, as I mentioned, I built a couple of these Chrome extensions. So because I've done a few of them, I ended up building out a Claude skill to help me build more Chrome extensions. So after I built the first two, I had Claude look at both and figure out what was the patterns that were common across them and work on a skill so I could just build the third, the fourth, the fifth in a much simpler version and extract out that common piece. I have found Claude skills to be a mixed bag in terms of actually being picked up automatically. So I am going to explicitly say like, use the skill, but technically you're not supposed to need to do that. But I definitely found that that's buried in its approach. So I'm going to make a prompt here. It's going to more request the skill.

• 21:14Claire Vo?

  And for folks that are wondering how to set up their own skills, we do have a How I A episode. It is introduction to Claude skills where I explain that Claude skills are files in a folder. Sometimes they're zipped files in a folder. So if they seem mysterious to you, go check out that mini episode from, I think it was October or November and learn how to make your own Claude skills. They're pretty useful.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. So in here, the prompt's just going to be, first at mention the PRD. So we have that. And we're say, use the Claude skill for creating Chrome extensions to build out this PRD.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  And one thing, Claude Code has added this feature where you can edit a prompt instead of just in the terminal in a code file. And so in Claude Code, if you hit Ctrl plus G, it will open that prompt in a text editor. So especially for me, where navigating that terminal is not super screen reader friendly, I now am navigating it in the same place that I write code on a day-to-day basis, which is very screen reader accessible. And so again, other people may find this to be useful. You can craft deeper prompts. You can like Ctrl F in here. You can do whatever. It's just a file. And so it's a really useful tool they added a few versions ago to make it a little bit easier to work with. And I'm just going to put a note here.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Use my OpenAI key from my shared Chrome extension config. I've had some, I don't want to keep pasting my OpenAI keys and stuff like that. So I end up pulling out some shared config to share across all my Chrome extensions. That way I don't need to rinse or repeat that step over and over again. So I saved this file now. And now whenever I close this, it's going to replace my prompt in Claude Code with that completed prompt.

• 23:08Claire Vo?

  Oh, interesting.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's super effective, especially as you want to do a deeper prompt to use this and not have to worry about the whole terminal side of things. Cool, now we're going to kick this off. And so I do have this Claude Code session right now in planning mode. You'll see it's requesting you the skill, which is great. We want to use our skill. I want to shrink this terminal so we can see more Claude. So I don't really need this as much. Okay, it's going to run some commands that actually pull in that Claude, that Chrome extension config that I talked about. Another thing I have to make Claude Code a little more accessible is, again, I'm not necessarily seeing everything that pops in as it's going. And so I set up a Claude hook that whenever Claude needs user input, it will. Basically like ding a bell on my computer.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  So I could hear a sound that is like, oh, Joe, you need to do something right now to work on this. I actually don't want Claude code to read this file. So I'm going to say no, because this is is some secret configuration. So I'm going to say, no, don't read that file. Now that has a API key in the don't read it. If you need, you can use J Q to extract the keys. Say unluckily, I am an engineer, so it's not like fully vibe coding this from scratch. I know that there's a utility that will extract just the keys out of a JSON object. And Claude won't be able to see the values, which is the actual secrets there. So now here we are.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  It's just going to make a SIM link to this extension for us. So we don't need to worry about the configuration. And if I ever do change it, it will automatically update in all my extensions. So instead of having each one of their own API key and my key becomes invalidated for some reason. Having to update all of them. I use this concept called a symbolic link. So just link the same config file into all my extensions. So one change fixes everywhere.

• 25:02Claire Vo?

  Yeah, and this is one of those things that's just easy to do when you're running these things locally or just building stuff for yourself is you just make the maintenance and

• 25:13Claire Vo?

  the maintenance and deploy of these really easy for yourself and make it as simple as possible for you to repeat building things and using the same, for example, API keys. And you know, when you want to share all these publicly and publish them to the Chrome extension marketplace, we can, we can do a little cleanup.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  Exactly. So here's our plan. And just like before, Ctrl G also works to edit plans in the editor. So similarly, this is going to be a pain to read in this terminal for a screen reader. But also, if I want to make a tiny tweak to one thing here, I don't need to worry about telling Claude to update it or write it to a file. I just hit Ctrl G. Opens it up in this file and now we have our full plan here and you can just tweak different parts of it if you want and modify it. So it's another great usage of the Ctrl-G shortcut.

• 26:00Claire Vo?

  Yeah, I want to call this out for people because so many folks would get something like this and then if it was wrong, kind of say, no, this is wrong, please update XYZ or ABC. And you know, you're calling out, not only is that a pretty inefficient way for you to interact with this file in terms of accessibility and your need for a screen reader, but it's also just not the fastest way to give it feedback. And so your ability to just take this, move it into code, use this Ctrl-G, I believe, edit it, close it out, run it, is just, again, a lot more efficient.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we'll do a quick one through this plan. It's, I'm using now again some more keyboard shortcuts just to break it down and fold the markdown headings. So I can, from my perspective, it's hard for me to visually, or I don't visually scan the page. So reading through a big file, I typically in code or markdown rely on folding. So I can collapse different sections and read them and then expand only the sections I care about. So I don't care about certain aspects here, but like, maybe I want to get deep into the error handling piece. So I'll expand that section and just read this part. So we got some just logging, some key patterns. But this plan generally looks good to me. So now I will just save this and again, close the file. And that is what is over here in

• 27:22Speaker 00

  the prompt. Because I didn't modify it, it didn't take any time, it was just ready. But if I modified it, it would take a split second while it loads that new plan in and then it moves forward.

• 27:30Claire Vo?

  Yeah, and I just have to call this again, out again, for people who are maybe listening to the podcast or again, are not paying attention to what it means to use a screen reader here, which is you got your little, your little headphone plugged in right now. And I am so impressed that you're using the screen reader while walking us through this demo. And what I think is so, so fascinating about watching your workflow here is it's super efficient and very fast, even if you don't take into account you're using a screen reader. So the fact that you've been able to build these shortcuts, these tools, use Claude code in a more effective way. And then you add on this layer of, and it makes using this, this kind of screen reader.

• 28:16Claire Vo?

  A lot more accessible to you is just very impressive and I don't want people to miss that there's this invisible layer that we don't get to see or hear right now that you're also putting in between this, which adds a little bit of micro friction.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think one thing that's great about Claude Code, so like right now visually, one of the options is selected in blue. I don't necessarily know which one it is and using the arrow keys, it does not tell me with the screen reader what's selected, but Claude Code has done a great job of standardizing where one means yes, two means often yes, but like manually with like a variation and then three is like no or type something extra. And so I can, I can basically decide to use the arrow keys and enter, I can just be like, yeah, I want, I want to just move forward here. Should I hit the number one?

• 29:01Claire Vo?

  Yeah.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  And so they've done a good job of using, I think, lots of different inputs and lots of different ways to make this a little more accessible as it goes as well.

• 29:07Claire Vo?

  Yep. And so that consistency, again, maybe this is for folks that are building AI products and trying to reinforce workflows, especially for folks that are building maybe these terminal UIs that I think are really lovely and interesting to build is you want, you know, people love the terminal because it's so fast and you want it to both be performance fast, but you also want it to be UI UX fast, which is if your user always knows one is X, two is Y, three is Z, then they can consistently use these keyboard patterns of one key or two keys to efficiently get through your UI. And I think, you know, taking that mental friction, that cognitive friction off a user by driving consistency and patterns that people

• 29:52Claire Vo?

  can either explicitly or implicitly learn is a really useful tool when you're using UI that is more constrained. Because again, a terminal UI is naturally constrained to basically text.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, and Claude Code has been working on and has released a PS Code extension that is more of a GUI. I've just found that it's a little bit lacking behind some of the latest and greatest features. And I'm like, I want everything immediately. Some of it was spoiled, but I think that's going to catch up as we go to and it may be a potentially more screen reader accessible option for some of these things.

• 30:27Claire Vo?

  Yeah. And again, we love a beep boop at the end of an agent completion. So I love, I love the cursor sound. I love that you're using one here for, for Claude Code because... Again, I'm presuming with your screen reader, you're not going to read this whole stream of what

• 30:45Speaker 00

  Too much going on.

• 30:46Claire Vo?

  No, that's too much for you.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  I think it's a big difference too between like vibe coding things and like production quality code, right? The final output here is just for me. It's going to run in my Chrome. I don't really care what the code looks like at all. Versus when I am building software for my, my full-time day job and actually building stuff that's going to be in the hands of millions of users and many developers, I do do things a lot differently. The plan, I'm going to read very detailed what it's going to actually do. The, the code I'm going to be reading, I'm going to be doing smaller commits and reviewing it kind of chunk by chunk and, and getting much more detailed. In this case, uh, yeah, when the final output is, it's just a user of one, the, the code quality is, is a lot less important.

• 31:27Claire Vo?

  Yeah. What matters is, does it, does it work?

• 31:29Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 31:30Claire Vo?

  And it doesn't work and a little bit of like, did you leak your API key? Those are the two things we want to worry about. But other than that, we are, we are on our, on our way. And you know, the, the other thing that I think is really fun here is because you've built, I think the idea that you pick a platform or a framework for a set of your personal software and then establish best practices through a skill and then just rinse and repeat for other use cases is a really good way to get super fluent with some of these AI tools. And so I've seen a lot of people say,

• 32:10Claire Vo?

  all I do is build markdown based repos for my documentation and everything else. Everything I build is just a markdown based repo. And then I've gotten really good at using Cursor for this. And then, you know, you have this example of, uh, every, you know, not everything, I'm sure, but like a lot of what I build are going to be Chrome extensions. So I'm going to make, you know, this framework, get it going. And then I can get really good at Claude code because I'm not relearning a technology and on top of relearning a tool. And so I do think it's you get compounding effects by staying in the same technical space when you're trying to learn these by coding tools because you're not trying to learn, you're not trying to learn on two fronts. You're trying to learn on just the tool, the tooling front and some of the technical pieces have already been established.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  For sure. And I think as we talked about before, when we were starting like return on investment gets better and better because building this one is my third takes half the time as the first one. And when I build the fifth, I think it's had to take a fifth of the time of the first one. Like I am getting better. The Claude skill, each time I build one, I'm just going to feed it back in and be like, what was the skill missing? Like make, make it better. And so I think it makes, uh, the return investment may turn into be like two days of payback period or something crazy. So yeah, it does. It does feel like it's cool to, to, I think, spread out and try many different things, but it does also just feel great to be like, I have an idea. It is in my hands in under 30 minutes. Like it's, it's just very cool.

• 33:34Claire Vo?

  Yeah. And again, this is one of those things where I tell people to work on their anti to do list. And when you have a recurring task or a recurring point of friction where you're constantly like opening links from Slack in a new tab and then trying to come back to them later and read them. Or, you know, you would be constantly doing this, like, let's zoom in on this image and figure out what it is. And is it something I need to worry about? When you have those recurring tasks, it's a hundred percent worth it. Instead of spending the time on the task itself, to spend the time never having to do that task again. And I like this idea of

• 34:14Claire Vo?

  the payback period of personal software basically collapsing to zero because it really just illustrates where we are in terms of the efficiency and value out of AI, which is, it is much more important to learn to build some of these tools than to do the task right now. Like the payoff is so much higher to learn how to automate the task versus doing the task. And if you can just do the, um, change your muscle memory to every time you do the task, pause yourself and say, actually, I'm going to learn how to automate the task. You can really, really create a lot of leverage in, in your day to day life, even in your personal life.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. And we are just about done here. So I was checking back in on our little to-do list, which it just finished. So it's doing some final steps here, but we're just about ready to actually load this in. Right now, it's just kind of analyzing to see. Yeah, perfect. So it's running this one last step, which is going to be basically telling us, hey, go, go load this in. So, once we are done with this, we need to actually load it into Chrome. So Chrome has a mode for extensions called Developer Mode. You'll see I have that toggle on at the top. And it basically means that you can install extensions not from the Chrome Web Store. You can install extensions like from your local computer.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  So you don't want to generally have that on because like somebody could have sideloaded in some some credit card skimmer that you've imported or something. But if you know what you're doing and you know, you just built a thing, you can go in here and turn this on. And then this looks a little bit different. Once you have this on compared to probably you guys who are not having this on, look in your Chrome Extensions world. Because we have these options on the side here to load an unpacked extension. So this means an extension that's not like fully deployed in the App Store. So let's hit this. And this is going to open up our little file browser here. So let's just pop back. And we had called this Slack summary extension. Okay, so that is now loaded in. The bone of truth was that the software is you can only test it

• 36:22Speaker 00

  or easily test it in Chrome. So we're going to actually try it out. Whenever you download a new extension, you do need to refresh your tab. So it picks up that extension. So right now I tried to use it. It's still working with the extensions that I had at the time I loaded it. So I'm going to refresh this Slack. So I can pick up our new extension here. And our moment of truth is going to be we're going to focus on this message. And I'm going to hit my shortcut of Ctrl Shift one and we'll see, did we, did we nail it?

• 36:51Claire Vo?

  Oh, look, you think of the black color, right?

• 36:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's kind of interesting. So it's processing our link. We'll see, did it work? So it kind of work, but we have JSON here, right? It's not, it's not perfect. So let's, let's work on a one, one level of refinement here. So I'm going to take a, a quick snippet shortcut of this. So I take a screenshot of this and we're going to send this back to Claude code and say, almost. So again, it'd be cool if we one shot it. I've been a really cool demo, but it's not a perfect one shot. So we'll make one slight tweak here. And I'm actually use a custom slash command I wrote to deal with screenshots.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  So because I'm developing on Windows, but I actually run Claude code in this thing called the Windows subsystem for Linux, it doesn't have access to my Windows clipboard. So I can't do what everyone else can do, which is just like hit Ctrl V here and paste it. So I add a slash command here called paste image that uses some PowerShell shortcuts to pull images out of my clipboard and share them with Claude. And so I can take that snippet and share it. And again, this similarly, I was like, would copy a file and I'd like save it in Windows, then move it to Linux and then import it with an app mention. And I was like, there's gotta be a better way. And I use the slash command now all the time for, for building stuff out.

• 38:15Claire Vo?

  This is, this is extreme software engineer stuff where you're like, okay, I run on this OS, but I run my terminal on this and now I can't access my clipboard, but I still like it that way. So I'm going to write a little script to give myself a two word shortcut to make this happen.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  And so it ported this and it just, it drops screenshots in our, in my TMP directory. So I just have to say, yep, please read it. So again, it's, it's saving those, uh, those two minutes every day adds up, adds up fast. And so it's going to fix this little JSON piece here. And again, it was kind of, it was close. It, it copied right content, just didn't display it, right? And so now it's going to go off and work on this for another second here and we should hopefully have a, a quick update. And the nice thing is with, uh, with Chrome extensions and the developer mode, there's just an easy one click button where you will update and grab the latest copy of all of your extensions. So if as you're working on multiple at a time or whatever, you can just hit that button and it's going to update for us. So we'll see it's finishing up here.

• 39:15Claire Vo?

  And one of the things that it's doing, just I'm calling this out for people who are writing. Um, queries to OpenAI, it's moving the JSON out of the prompt, which it's saying, please return JSON. I think it's actually just returning JSON as a um, string and text, and it actually moved that to change the response object to being JSON. So then it can actually be read by the um, by the Chrome extension in a, in a more structured way.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  Control Shift one, see if it works.

• 39:46Claire Vo?

  We're doing German.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  Want to truth?

• 39:47Claire Vo?

  Beautiful.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  We got it, nailed it. So again, we've got these takeaways. We can now action on this, and I can decide, do I actually care that iterable added MCP? I do. Uh, spoiler alert. Um, but yeah, again, we did it, uh, I think under, under 25 minutes here.

• 40:03Claire Vo?

  And is it working in your screen reader? Did the accessibility?

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, fully, fully accessible. Um, so this modals in general can be sometimes problematic, um, because a screen reader will sometimes read behind the modal.

• 40:16Claire Vo?

  Yep.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  Um, but surprisingly, although not, a bunch of the web is not accessible. If you tell some of the foundational models, like, please make this accessible, the accessibility standards are actually incredibly well documented. So they, they do actually a great job with this. So they, they use the right, uh, it's called ARIA, A R I A, roles and make this modal have the right focus, not let you read behind it. So, uh, on the box, they're not going to make everything screen reader accessible, but you say, hey, go do this. It, it'll gladly go follow the spec and make it accessible.

• 40:44Claire Vo?

  So this is a meta question, and maybe before, before I get into the meta question, let's just recap for folks what we saw. So you built a Chrome extension that's focused to the web version of Slack. Um, that, that Chrome extension that's running locally because you've toggled on developer mode in your Chrome settings will take a focused link that's shared by a colleague or somebody in Slack. It will go out, it will parse that link. We'll see if that any links in it. It'll parse it, it'll take some key takeaways. The way you built this is you bopped into VS Code, you dictated a short PRD, um, you let AI kind of build that out. You made minor tweaks to it, but basically shipped it. You used Claude code, including some custom slash commands.

• 41:32Claire Vo?

  And a Claude skill specifically around building Chrome extensions to then scaffold out that Chrome extension. You showed us Ctrl G in Claude code where you can actually just modify prompts and inputs as code, which is much more efficient, both from an accessibility perspective and just general user experience perspective. And you showed us a custom screenshot. So you're very special, as I say, you know, unique snowflake software engineer environment can operate as you want, even if there are some technical hurdles. And then now we have this great little extension that I want running on my app. So this is great, Joe. I love this. I want to hop into some lightning round questions. And this has

• 42:16Claire Vo?

  given me an idea of one that I really want to ask you, which is about MCPs. So one of the things that I think is so interesting about MCPs is it allows you to bypass all UI and just get to the bones of what a SaaS product does. And I can imagine that while there are lots of okay accessibles, enterprise software products, not all of them are building for maximum accessibility, either in their design or in their kind of underlying way they're implemented. Have you found MCPs and just that interface into some of these SaaS tools has improved accessibility for you, has not? What are your thoughts there?

• 42:59Speaker 00

  I think the altered goal, Moche, of mine is I would love to do everything in one place and not have to switch tools, like whether the context switch cost or just a switch cost. So having MCPs has been great for that. Luckily, I actually think lots of enterprise software surprisingly is being built pretty successfully. Like I want to really give strong kudos to like Google Docs, Google Docs for what it does. It's so crazy accessible. And the work that people don't know that goes in to make it that like every single thing that is being done is being communicated to the screen reader, basically letter by letter via this like secreting, the secret system that people don't know about called like ARIA live announcements is kind of crazy. But I do find like, hey, I need to get something from three sites. Like, that's kind of painful. Like, can I

• 43:44Speaker 00

  just use the Notion MCP and Google Docs MCP or Glean in there is great. And particularly Notion is one that is a little bit harder. I think they do their best from accessibility standpoint in some ways, but there's a lot going on in an Notion post, an Notion article. So I think that's another example where it's like. Yeah, I can just pull this down and work in the markdown version. That's going to be a lot easier. And again, I've got, it's way easier to navigate with these like keyboard shortcuts and the folding features. So I will pull down some Notion posts and just be like, dump this into a markdown file for me and then use my little code shortcuts to help navigate some of those pieces.

• 44:16Claire Vo?

  Yeah, I love that. And so my second question again is around personal software and the ability to translate. Sort of as you said, you can take a pretty complex Notion page, turn it into markdown. That allows you to, you know, read and parse it in a much more efficient way. And so I think this ability to translate files or formats is a really exciting part of AI. And we've hinted at a couple of things we've seen in this episode, a little bit of like image to text, a little bit of voice to text. But I'm curious for you, what are you most excited about in sort of like the multimodal world of AI? And you know, what recently has come out that's, you know, caught your eye and made you excited?

• 45:00Claire Vo?

  Or what are you hoping to see in the next couple of months or years that you think could really open up stuff? Either for you personally or just as a product builder?

• 45:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll talk in the personal space. So I have, I have two kids, I have a five year old and a three year old. And reading books to them is, is a challenge. I don't know Braille. I've been trying to learn, but it's a hard skill to pick up at 33. And so I've memorized a handful of books and I'll read those, but it's not really reading, it's fake, fake reading. But I, a big shout out to the Gemini app and its like live share features. I can now read any book. It sounds like me reading it, but me and my three year old Cole will sit on the couch. He'll bring a book over and I'll be like, hey, let's, I can read this one or no Gemini can read this one for us. And we'll turn the pages and say like Gemini, next page. And Gemini will read that page and then we'll turn to the next one and it'll read the content of that.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  And so I think just like equitable access to everything is, is great. And that piece is one thing that I was always afraid of was like, can I read stories? I can memorize stories, I can tell stories, but there is something to just like your son being like, I want to read this book. And you having to be like, sorry, I can't. And now that's our, I can't becomes like, sorry, I can with the assistance of so many different tools now. But I think the Gemini one is particularly useful. And I found that one to be the strongest for just like. Easy sharing, just saying next page, it knows all the context, it immediately starts reading it. I have like Meta Glasses, I have the ChatGPT Pro, I've got all these things, but I think Gemini is doing the best job of it right now. And this is before me trying any of the Gemini Pro 3 that just came out to see if any of that makes it even better.

• 46:33Claire Vo?

  Well, that is a very, very sweet story. And yes, I was just thinking, I wish the Meta Glasses, which I love and use every day, would also help do a better job there. But it's awesome to hear that Gemini can add to that special time with kids, which, as you and I were talking before the show, you know, we both are parents of boys, is such a special time. So my last question is, when AI is not listening, and I'm curious if you type or if you speak this, what are your prompting techniques? Have you ever Whisper Flow yelled at your AI? Or, you know, do you have any tricks for us when AI or Claude gets really, really stuck?

• 47:18Speaker 00

  It's kind of a nerdy answer, which makes sense for me. But my typical mode is basically like clear the context and start fresh as much as possible. I think, I think a lot of people will try and like keep massaging it and being like, if I just send this one extra prompt in this conversation, it'll figure it out. It's like, no, you just have to start from scratch and take the learnings that you have from the last time. And so sometimes I'll be like, this hasn't been going great. What did you, what did you learn about this? Take that and feed that into the next prompt. But most of the time I used to be like, let's start from scratch. Something clearly got poisoned in this context. And when we start from scratch, I feel like it just, everything just feels smoother.

• 47:57Claire Vo?

  I love it. Well, Joe, thank you so much for showing this. I think it's just one of those workflows that we haven't seen before. Everybody can find a use case. I am thinking of all sorts of little micro frictions in my own life where a keyboard shortcut or two could really make things a little bit better for me. So where can we find you and how can we be helpful to you?

• 48:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I mentioned at Baby List, Baby List is very actively hiring. And if you are somebody who likes using AI in your day to day building of software and you're Software engineer, we are Ruby on Rails and React shop, but hiring across the board, all different levels. So check us out on on dabless.com. And personally, I'm on LinkedIn as well. So feel free, especially if there are any accessibility questions or any questions on some of the Chrome extension piece, I'm always happy to answer on LinkedIn.

• 48:45Claire Vo?

  Well, thanks for joining How AI.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 48:49Claire Vo?

  Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube, or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.