Untitled-1: The Vinyl Tribunal

I built a tool called The Vinyl Tribunal that judges whether a vinyl record is better used as a coaster or as something to listen to. The vinyl piece is just because I love vinyl records and thought it was a cool concept for a website. The real product is getting your music taste judged by a made up algorithm.

I chose this idea because music taste is personal and people are protective of their preferences. The concept is easy to understand regardless of your music knowledge, it draws a definitive, arbitrary line, and it seems to rage-bait everyone who touches it.

The stack was Claude Code, specifically Opus, hosted on Netlify with a domain from Namecheap. Opus carried the whole project; the only forced pause came when my credits ran out for a stretch.

The hardest part was drawing the line. The "algorithm" relies on public-facing music lists I agreed with, Cole Cuchna's taste (his Dissect podcast has earned my trust), and my own biases. Once friends and family started using it, I went back several times to right musical wrongs by hand. The biggest: Jennifer Lopez's On the 6 beat Mariah Carey's Butterfly in a duel. I received multiple expletive-laden texts for that one.

The look and feel came from Claude's Design tool. I asked for something that felt 60s or 70s retro, and four iterations later the final version isn't far from where it started. I think it does a decent job of representing a vinyl era.

Two things surprised me. The first is what's not in it: no LLM anywhere. No Claude API, no Supabase, no backend. I did make two external API calls to MusicBrainz for the album search functionality and Cover Art Archive for album artwork, but every piece of judging data lives in the code. A tool people swear is judging their soul is, under the hood, a very opinionated lookup table.

The second is how hard people took it. I knew music was personal, but I underestimated how loud the feedback would be. My sister, unhappy with a Jack Johnson rating, told me to "literally fuck right off." That was a high point.

The easy takeaway is that emotion drives engagement, but everyone already knows that. What I actually learned was practical: how to prompt Opus effectively, and how to use Claude Design to create a design system instead of a one-off look. Those skills are repeatable on the next project.

Get your own music tastes judged at vinyltribunal.com.

You can reply to this email to yell at me about it.