Most AI apps replace something boring. I built one that brings back lying in the grass and watching clouds
I got tired of every new AI app being a "productivity assistant" or another chatbot, so I built something deliberately useless and joyful.
**Spottle**: point your phone at the sky, and a vision-language model tells you what shapes it sees in the clouds in real-time. Dragons. Turtles. A chef holding a pizza. A guy who looks suspiciously like your uncle. It's pareidolia-as-a-camera-app.
Tech side: built in Claude Code, currently A/B testing Gemini 3 Pro, GPT-5, and Claude Opus 4.7 on the detection pipeline. The hard part wasn't accuracy — it was getting VLM inference fast enough that it feels *live* instead of "submit and wait."
The weird part is how much I actually use it. You start noticing the sky again. Walking the dog got noticeably slower because I keep stopping to point the phone up.