This is the story behind Live Coloring Book, which I showed here as a Show HN on 13 October. You color a page in the browser, or print it, color it with real crayons and take one phone photo, and the drawing comes alive in your colors and walks, swims or flies into a shared world with everyone else's drawings.
This time I didn't write the code. I built the first, fully working version in two weeks with AI agents, and I've kept improving it since: Claude in Claude Code wrote the code, and the drawings came from OpenAI's image model through Codex. I was the product owner and reviewed everything by eye. The write-up covers the parts I found most interesting: generating animation rigs from flat line drawings with no animators, reading crayon colors from a phone photo entirely in the browser, and what went wrong along the way.
Feedback I'd love:
sheets the photo reader fails on (bad light, bent paper, old phones); walks or animals that look wrong to you; whether it runs smoothly on your cheapest device. The article was drafted with Claude from the repository and edited by me.