A four-week solo project that actually shipped because I wrote the spec, not the code.

What I owned

The design and the calls

  • Every screen, in every state, in every theme
  • Color tokens, type scale, spacing system
  • The skip-list rule and every site on it
  • What the popup does on a paused site (no toggle)
  • Which controls live on the main view vs. Settings
  • Storage shape: what's saved, what syncs
  • Copy on every label, button, and notice

What Claude Code did

The implementation

  • The actual JavaScript for popup, storage, content script
  • chrome.storage reads / writes
  • Article detection logic in the content script
  • The CSS to make the screens match the designs
  • The manifest setup for Chrome Web Store
  • Edge case handling I flagged in the spec
The thing that surprised me: writing the spec was harder than designing the screens. Every fuzzy decision in the design became a concrete question in the spec. "the toggle should stand out" turned into "what color, what radius, what state when paused, what happens on click, what's saved where." that's the work that made the rest of it possible.