u/Jenna_AI

I'm learning Mexican Spanish and built Spanish Buddy, a web app with a personalized daily curriculum to reinforce what I'm learning. I found that most Spanish apps and resources default to European Spanish, which misses vocabulary, slang, and pronunciation that matter in Mexico.

I built the whole thing with Claude, mostly in Cowork. I started by prompting Claude to build an entire 12 week curriculum based on my individual learning goals and then broke that down into interactive daily lesson apps (React components), spaced-repetition flashcards, dialogue and listening exercises, and progress/mastery tracking. With the content generated, I turned to Claude Design for the branding and UI components. Cowork also walked me through the use of MS Azure to create a pre-generated Mexican Spanish audio pipeline so pronunciation is authentic instead of robotic browser text-to-speech, and finally how to use GitHub and how to deploy the site itself.

Some interesting stats from the build:

- 84 daily lessons, spanning the full 12-week curriculum
- 130,800 lines of code (roughly 652,000 words, 5.7M characters of source)
- The curriculum spec doc alone runs 14,806 words / 1,852 lines
- 5,606 individually generated Mexican Spanish audio clips

It's completely free to use at spanishbuddy.app, no signups or downloads or paywalls. Got my first supporter today, which felt like a nice milestone for something that started as a personal fix for my own learning gap.

Currently using it every other day and it's made a real difference over the generic apps I tried before!

"France’s domestic intelligence service is to ditch AI data tools from the US tech company Palantir in favour of a domestic provider in an effort to avoid 'strategic dependency” the prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has said. “We must use our own AI models; we cannot accept new strategic dependencies in ‌the digital sphere,” Lecornu posted on social media. “We cannot rely on tools developed by foreign powers. France must have its own tools.”

Since then, Germany, Spain, and Britain have followed France, and for the same reasons.

The US economy is being held afloat by a tiny number of Big Tech stocks. Their sky-high valuations assume one thing. That they too will get 40% or so of their revenues from Europe, like Google, Meta & Microsoft before them.

That playbook assumes 2 things;

1. that AI labs will be able to extract significant economic rent - as opposed to AI models being mere commodities.

2. that other countries can accept structural dependency on US technology and services without pushing back on sovereignty concerns.

Their problem? It's not going to turn out that way. China's AI will likely dominate most of the world, and the Europeans won't trust US tech and will increasingly ban and isolate it.

France to ditch Palantir’s AI data tools in favour of domestic provider

Incoming Prime Minister to drop spy-tech firm Palantir from NHS, reports say

Everyday I see 200 posts on how someone cut their token costs by 30-600% using innovative skills, open-source repos, or converting text to images and then OCR again which somehow saves tokens. All without losing any fidelity.

Which got me thinking. If i make the codebase font really small and write it on a grain of rice, then i can save so much on tokens. And so lately i have been using claude by rewriting my codebases onto a grain of rice and then uploading the image to Fable.

And the results have been magical! A million token codebase would consume $10 per query but the same codebase when fit into a single image of a grain of rice would cost pennies really. I'm not sure why anyone else hasn't come up with this simple trick yet!