My dad likes to watch movies that have a Mandarin soundtrack, but Amazon Prime Videos has no “search by language” facility. Instead, you have to search on some other term (like “Jackie Chan”), manually click on each video to pull up the detail page, and see if what’s on Prime Video has a mandarin audio track. It’s super slow and painful.
So yesterday I spent 3 hours doing my first AI-assisted major coding project. I wrote a “Mandarin Movie Finder” script in Python using Claude Code that would log into Prime Video, search on a term I enter, and then go through all the hits and add any unwatched Mandarin language video to my dad’s watchlist.
It worked great, but it took a long time because as good as AI coding is supposed to be, it really required me to point it in the right direction multiple times. It’s particularly bad at debugging (and many, many times kept going down ratholes that were obvious to me) and building functions (AI doesn’t need to reuse code; it can just copy/paste the same 7 lines over and over again, so factoring out code just isn’t natural for it). I’m still not sure if it was faster than if I just coded it myself manually, but I have to say it was a lot of fun. It felt like a video game, where I’m trying to teach a junior who is super eager and super fast how to write a program. It was an interesting experiment for me.
Leave a Reply