Today I am going to explain to you how I used Claude to create the images above. Remember. Claude cannot generate images.

My friend Edgar pointed out that my album art picture which I am also using on diary of a blind American, did not look much like me.

Let's talk about some technical requirements. Album artwork on iTunes for podcasts is 3000 pixels by 3000 pixels, that is width and height. This creates a square hi/res image that can be easily resized. I decided I wanted to use my album artwork that I had generated for my podcast, also on my website. So if I was going to replace one, I would replace it with the same technical requirements. I had an ex-boyfriend, James, he was a piece of shit but he was a good photographer (he was the type that wanted to be the hero so bad but he fell short when it came down to it.. I had a picture that he had taken of me shirtless drinking a beer I think. I decided that would be the picture. I just wanted to pick an accent color for an matte to make it square. Claude suggested charcoal gray to continue the masculine tone.

Now remember, I'm blind. In case you forgot. lol Normally I would just use Photoshop or something like it. I would probably be even more picky. But you cannot even use Google Gemini to create an image so specific in technical requirements. You get what it gives you. So I went to my trusty Claude as usual. It cannot generate images at all. But it can write code that can generate images. I've got an iPad and swift playgrounds. I trust Apple's API's. I am an apple guy. So I decided I wanted to do an iPad swift app that would let me choose a photo from a shared album, apply the matte I want. Center the image. Up scale it as necessary. And return the final image as a saved photo in my photo library. Note* Swift playgrounds is only available for the iPad. You need it to do real development for iOS on iOS.

I gave it a brief overview of what I wanted to create. It gave me about six questions to answer. It suggested a bevel on the edges of the picture that is azure blue. The main accent color of my website.

In less than 30 seconds it wrote the entire application. I copy and pasted the code to swift playgrounds on my iPad. And ran it. It did exactly what I wanted. The first time. I verified the output using Claude because it knows what I was trying to achieve already and I am blind and cannot verify it myself.

I want you to think of the implications this has on accessibility. I want you to think about what it could mean when you can create completely custom software to do exactly what you want to do in 30 seconds. People in technology are in general not alarmist. They thought we would have artificial intelligence in the 80's. You see how long it took. It was people in finance tech who got all excited about crypto. But any technology journalist worth their salt will tell you this is a revolution that is coming faster than anything that has come before.

Written by B. On May 15, 2026. Directors Cut

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