Story

I discovered a free online Pomodoro timer in 2018. [1] I'd been a frequent user of it from then until it was decommissioned in early '25. I found it super helpful for timeboxing stuff within easy-to-commit-to intervals.

About a month ago, I started having really intense hunger pangs for it.

A few pages of the original implementation are archived on the Wayback Machine. A couple weeks ago, I got the idea to reverse-engineer it using those pages as a reference.

That's when I started researching what the Claude Code fuss was about. I wasn't then and am still not ready to spend money on AI. So, when I stumbled on the free Claud.ai, I figured I'd test it out on my reverse-engineering idea.

I used Copilot, Sourcegraph's Cody Visual Studio Code agent and ChatGPT a decent amount last year. More recently I've been using Gemini Code Assist. But this project was my first time ever using Claud.ai.

I guess Claude.ai in the browser uses React and Tailwind CSS for building web apps. I'm not a frontend developer. So, I had zero experience with either of those particular frameworks.

And that's the remarkable thing about the outcome. [2] Having zero experience with those specific technologies, I managed to successfully reverse-engineer a 95%-working online timer that's ≈faithful to the original, in my spare time!

Claud.ai in the browser turned out to be the perfect development environment for this particular experiment. Having the browser's Developer Tools handy was literally priceless for digging around in the HTML and CSS. Together with The Wayback Machine, that was hugely key to having Claud.ai (and the also-free Gemini CLI in later iterations) nail the original look and feel of the Marinara Timer as closely as I could.

I gotta say: Like all of my hobby projects, I took my sweet time on this one, too. Hobby projects are as much about learning for me as they are about the finished thing itself.

[1] https://g2ww.short.gy/1SpicyTomater

[2] http://lingocoder.com/clod.ai/