Prompting Claude to build a coffee journal

To truly grasp the possibilities, limits, and limitations of Generative AI, you have to get your hands dirty with the technology, meaning you have to use it not just once, but ongoing and consistently. Reading about the technology can only get you so far. One of the assignments in my AI in Education course for example, invites students to turn to an AI tool as much as they can over three days and to reflect on that experience.

I’ve been doing something similar, and when I saw D’Arcy’s post on prompting Claude to build a sleep journal, I thought that I should try to do something similar, and since I’ve neglected this blog a little, I should post it here.  A few adjustments and errors, and about an hour later, I built a simple coffee journal that tracks and visualizes your coffee consumption and purchases over time. The initial prompt was:

I need to build a “coffee journal” to document my coffee purchasing patterns. I need it to be a standalone web page that stores the coffee data, visualizes the data and calculates trends. Coffee journal entries will be entered every afternoon, to document my purchases of the day. It needs fields for: number coffees for the day (integer), time that I purchased each of the coffees (time), kind of coffee each one was (text field), and cost of each coffee (integer). I need to visualize the data over time, and calculate and display total cost per day and in total so far.

One of the adjustments for example, was the kind of coffee field. Initially I imagined this to be an open-ended text field. But then realized that users might want to track the kind of coffees they had. I converted this into a dropdown menu, which then made it possible to track the kinds of purchases over time. Will I be using this? Probably not – I prefer weak homemade coffee – but the point is to see what Claude can and cannot do in terms of a simple web app.