Apps / AI · Nick Soderstrom

iPhone app · focus blocker

One tap. Your distracting apps lock for exactly as long as you choose.

Clam uses Apple’s Screen Time entitlement for real blocking, keeps the countdown on your lock screen or the iPhone Duo outer display, and never sends a byte off the phone.

getclam.app Source on GitHub Case study

In development · App Store link goes live with the listing

9:41●●●

Clam🔥 12

✓

Clammed up for 2h 14m.

12-day streak. 30h 30m clammed up total.

25 min50 min90 min

Fold or lock your phone. That's it.

getclam.app

getclam.app, the landing page. Written and styled by the models, served from GitHub Pages.

The block screen

Open Instagram? Nope.

A Shield Configuration extension draws a branded block screen the moment you open a locked app. It shows what’s locked, how long is left, and that quitting early costs a ten-second hold and your streak.

9:41●●●

Instagram is clammed up

23 min left

Not a feed in sight. Unfolding to scroll means seeing this screen.

Hold 10s to quit early. Resets your streak.

Live Activity

The timer follows you to the lock screen.

ActivityKit puts the countdown on the lock screen and in the Dynamic Island. On iPhone Duo it lives on the outer display, so the fold itself becomes the ritual.

●●●🔒

Friday, October 39:41

23:14

ClamInstagram, TikTok, X locked50-minute session · 12-day streak

Live Activity on the lock screen, Dynamic Island and the iPhone Duo outer display.

Who did what

Claude & Grok · ~95%

Claude & Grok wroteMarket research, strategy doc, nine onboarding screens, SwiftUI app, three extensions, StoreKit 2 paywall, unit tests, Xcode project, App Store listing, entitlement request, landing site, legal pages, social kit.

Nick didThe idea, the “nothing leaves the phone” rule, every product decision, running builds on a real iPhone, pasting errors back, domains, accounts and the launch calendar.

The process

How it got made

Research the category
AI
Studied Opal, Jomo and Brick, priced the market and wrote a 30-day plan.
Me
Chose the fold as the hook and set the no-backend constraint.
Design the loop
AI
Wrote each onboarding screen and the belief it has to move, then the paywall.
Me
Read it as a user and cut anything that felt like a pitch.
Generate the app
AI
Produced the app, shield, monitor and widget targets file by file.
Me
Ran the builds, reported what broke on device, repeated.
Prepare the launch
AI
Listing, screenshots plan, privacy labels, creator brief, landing page.
Me
Registered getclam.app, set up Pages and the developer account.

Follow Clam

In development · App Store link goes live with the listing

getclam.app Source on GitHub

iPhone app · daily glow coach

The camera already knows. You just haven’t asked it.

Take one photo in the same light each morning, get a score for glow, evenness, texture and calm, and do a sixty-second ritual. The picture is processed on the phone and never uploaded.

lumenow.app Site source on GitHub Case study

In development · App Store link goes live with the listing

7:03●●●

Today

78Glow score. Not a diagnosis.

Glow82
Evenness74
Texture79
Calm77

14-day trend · +3 this week

lumenow.app

lumenow.app. The serif headline, the pricing and the “not a medical device” framing all came out of the same working sessions.

The scan

Same window. Same hour.

Consistency beats precision. Lume guides you to the same light every morning so the trend line means something, and it reads the photo on device.

7:02●●●

Same window · same hour

Line up your face

The picture stays on this device.

The ritual

Rinse. Press. Seal. SPF.

Four steps, fifteen seconds each, morning and evening. On iPhone Duo the face stays on one screen and the ritual on the other, like a book.

7:04●●●

Morning ritual

0:60

Rinse15s
Press15s
Seal15s
SPF15s

Sixty seconds. Then you're done.

Who did what

Claude & Grok · ~95%

Claude & Grok wrotePositioning against the skincare and glow-up apps, the scoring model, capture flow, trend view, share cards, StoreKit 2 trial, marketing site, App Store listing and social kit.

Nick didThe constraint that photos never leave the phone, the sixty-second limit, the Duo layout call, device testing and the decision to launch after Clam.

The process

How it got made

Find the gap
AI
Mapped the category: diagnosis apps on one side, shops on the other.
Me
Picked “coach with a camera” and said no to anything medical.
Write the product
AI
Screens, copy, pricing and the not-a-medical-device language.
Me
Approved the flow and the sixty-second ceiling.
Generate the app
AI
SwiftUI capture, on-device scoring, ritual timer, StoreKit 2.
Me
Tested scans on a real phone in real light.
Prepare the launch
AI
Listing, keywords, promo text, landing page, social handles plan.
Me
Registered lumenow.app and lined up the accounts.

Follow Lume

In development · App Store link goes live with the listing

lumenow.app Site source on GitHub

work-with-nick.com · built from prompts

The site you’re reading was built the same way.

No designer, no developer, no template. I described what I wanted in plain English, sent screenshots of my Upwork and LinkedIn profiles, and Claude Code wrote the pages, read my inboxes for real client history, cropped my photo, generated the résumé PDF and pushed every commit.

You’re on it

Live · updated by prompt

work-with-nick.com

The home page. Astro, plain CSS, no frameworks, deployed by a GitHub Actions workflow the model also wrote.

Real data, not lorem ipsum

It read my inbox so I didn’t have to.

With Gmail connected, it found the Upwork contract notifications, pulled contract titles, spotted my longest engagement and wrote the case studies. When a review only arrived as a screenshot, it transcribed it.

Taste, applied

“Easier on the eyes.”

Feedback went in as three words. The dense sidebar résumé came out as a clean role list, a downloadable one-page PDF generated from the same data, and a photo cropped from a LinkedIn screenshot.

Who did what

Claude Code · ~97%

Claude Code wroteSite architecture, every page and component, content schema, case studies, Clients page, résumé PDF generator, social preview image, photo crop, DNS instructions, deploy workflow, and this page.

Nick didA few dozen short messages, screenshots of Upwork and LinkedIn, the domain purchase, and taste: “easier on the eyes”, “like an Apple product page”.

The process

How it got made

Describe the outcome
AI
Scaffolded the site, sample content and a deploy pipeline in one pass.
Me
“Build me a portfolio website. I freelance and have had countless clients.”
Hand over the sources
AI
Read Gmail and Outlook, cloned the app repos, extracted the facts.
Me
Connected the inbox and sent profile screenshots.
React to what you see
AI
Repositioned the whole site when the real profile arrived.
Me
“The resume on the front page should be easier on the eyes.”
Ship
AI
Committed, pushed, generated the PDF and this showcase.
Me
Bought work-with-nick.com.

The prompts

What I actually typed

A few examples, lightly trimmed. Each one is followed by what happened next; the full list is below.

~60
Messages from Nick: 18
Screenshots: 30
Commits: 97%
Written by Claude Code

Nick
“Build me a portfolio website. I freelance and have had countless clients. We can feature clients, work, projects and the mobile apps I’ve developed. We need a domain too.”
Claude Code
Scaffolded an Astro site with a data-driven content model, six pages, light and dark themes, a GitHub Pages workflow and a domain shortlist.
Nick
“(three screenshots of the Upwork profile)”
Claude Code
Rewrote the positioning from developer to senior project manager and operations lead, with the real 257 contracts, 17,800+ hours and Top Rated Plus.
Nick
“Add a tab for clients. The resume on the front page should be easier on the eyes. Not sure if keeping or include a resume PDF instead.”
Claude Code
Built the Clients page, simplified the experience list and generated a one-page PDF from the same data.
Nick
“Include photos of the app’s websites and renders of the apps on phones. Like an Apple product page. Click which item you want to see, one at a time. The third can be this website itself.”
Claude Code
Rendered the app sites locally, built CSS phone mockups of the real screens, and produced this page with its three tiles.
Nick
“Let’s QA the site extensively after it’s live, and make sure the mobile version is also smooth.”
Claude Code
Wrote a Playwright audit that checks every page at three widths in both themes, then fixed the tap targets, heading order and overflow it found.

Show all 23 prompts

Nick
“Build me a portfolio website. I freelance and have had countless clients. We can feature clients, work, projects and the mobile apps I’ve developed. We need a domain too.”
Claude Code
Scaffolded an Astro site with a data-driven content model, six pages, light and dark themes, a GitHub Pages workflow and a domain shortlist.
Nick
“Upwork emails are in nickstrom5 inbox.”
Claude Code
Searched the connected mailboxes, found a live Upwork engagement in an Outlook thread and wrote it up under NDA-safe wording.
Nick
“(three screenshots of the Upwork profile)”
Claude Code
Rewrote the positioning from developer to senior project manager and operations lead, with the real 257 contracts, 17,800+ hours and Top Rated Plus.
Nick
“Apps built getclam.app and lume.”
Claude Code
Cloned both public repos, read the strategy and listing docs, and wrote accurate case studies and app cards.
Nick
“(four screenshots of LinkedIn experience)”
Claude Code
Replaced every sample case study with SPARC, BARBRI, Symplicity, Rippling, OFFX and Blackdove, and built the experience timeline.
Nick
“work-with-nick.com purchased. Mobile apps are in development.”
Claude Code
Pointed the site at the domain, added the CNAME, wrote out the Cloudflare DNS records and updated the app status.
Nick
“Add a tab for clients. The resume on the front page should be easier on the eyes. Not sure if keeping or include a resume PDF instead.”
Claude Code
Built the Clients page, simplified the experience list and generated a one-page PDF from the same data.
Nick
“(five screenshots of Upwork reviews)”
Claude Code
Transcribed five verbatim reviews with ratings, hours and endorsements. No sample content remained.
Nick
“Under Top 1% indicate that’s on Upwork. You can include my LinkedIn profile photo. App section: go over how these are made via Grok and Claude as AI experiments.”
Claude Code
Cropped the portrait out of a LinkedIn screenshot, added it to the home and About pages, and drafted the first version of the Apps/AI story.
Nick
“The circle in a circle looks weird, like an egg.”
Claude Code
Measured the face in the source image, re-cropped it to a true circle in code and dropped the extra CSS ring.
Nick
“Include photos of the app’s websites and renders of the apps on phones. Like an Apple product page. Click which item you want to see, one at a time. The third can be this website itself.”
Claude Code
Rendered the app sites locally, built CSS phone mockups of the real screens, and produced this page with its three tiles.
Nick
“Don’t show phones, maybe a laptop on the website project.”
Claude Code
Added a CSS laptop frame and switched the website story to desktop screenshots.
Nick
“Formspree, what to do?”
Claude Code
Explained the two-minute setup, then wired the form to the endpoint with a spam honeypot and a thank-you page.
Nick
“SEO on the site should be pristine.”
Claude Code
Added JSON-LD for the site, person and every case study, canonical URLs, Open Graph and Twitter tags, a sitemap and a generated social image.
Nick
“Let’s QA the site extensively after it’s live, and make sure the mobile version is also smooth.”
Claude Code
Wrote a Playwright audit that checks every page at three widths in both themes, then fixed the tap targets, heading order and overflow it found.
Nick
“About me page should have the photo, link to my LinkedIn, Upwork, etc.”
Claude Code
Added the Connect card and rewrote the skills to include the AI-directed development work.
Nick
“Google Search Console needed?”
Claude Code
Yes. Walked through domain verification on Cloudflare and submitted the sitemap.
Nick
“SEO check every week so we can keep it up to date, and QA the site.”
Claude Code
Scheduled a weekly routine that re-runs the audit against the live site and opens a pull request if anything drifts.
Nick
“The text in the blue circles looks off. The 1,000+ hours one looks best.”
Claude Code
Shortened every client badge to a few characters so none wraps.
Nick
“Actually let’s make it hello@work-with-nick.”
Claude Code
Changed the site email everywhere it appears: About, Contact, footer, résumé and structured data.
Nick
“Move featured roles from About to the Work tab.”
Claude Code
Moved the section and its styles across, and rewrote the Work page description to match.
Nick
“The résumé PDF design needs to be cleaner, less crowded.”
Claude Code
Redesigned the print page with a stats strip, more whitespace and a three-column skills grid, still one page.
Nick
“We will need to update the part of the site with the prompts to be accurate too. If it’s too many we can have them collapse.”
Claude Code
Rewrote this list from the session history, kept five examples up front and put the full list behind a “show all” toggle.

Want a site like this?

The same process works for a client site, an internal tool or a product. Start with one sentence.

Get in touch

Built with AI. Directed by me.

One tap. Your distracting apps lock for exactly as long as you choose.

Open Instagram? Nope.

The timer follows you to the lock screen.

Who did what

How it got made

Research the category

Design the loop

Generate the app

Prepare the launch

Follow Clam

The camera already knows. You just haven’t asked it.

Same window. Same hour.

Rinse. Press. Seal. SPF.

Who did what

How it got made

Find the gap

Write the product

Generate the app

Prepare the launch

Follow Lume

The site you’re reading was built the same way.

It read my inbox so I didn’t have to.

“Easier on the eyes.”

Who did what

How it got made

Describe the outcome

Hand over the sources

React to what you see

Ship

What I actually typed

Want a site like this?