I vibe coded a scroll-driven interactive documentary of my 5,000-mile motorcycle trip using Claude
This month I purchased a Claude max subscription with no real plan beyond just using it and trying to reach the usage limit by building whatever ideas I can come up with. I have an interest in coding/software concepts in general but completely lack the hard technical skills of an actual programmer and would by no means consider myself one.
A few years ago I bought a motorcycle from a corn farmer in Washington and then rode it across the country to Florida without any sort of planned route besides the need to go east and south. I slept beside the motorcycle at night wherever I happened to end up at the end of each day.
At one point after the trip I went back and traced my route into Google MyMaps so I would have it stored for my own personal memory. I also have a bunch of random pictures and videos from the trip sitting on a hard drive.
I've never bothered sharing the trip because I never felt like there was an available medium that could capture it how I'd want. I've basically always felt limited to either a photo dump or a YouTube video or a static Google Map, or maybe some other branded mapping platform with predefined settings that would essentially force a spontaneous act of adventure into a square box that I wouldn't want to bother with.
For example, at about 741 rotations per mile, the trip was composed of roughly 3.8 million rear tire rotations. That concept is something I really love thinking about personally and is how I broke the trip down as I was doing it, but how would you express or illustrate that sort of detail?
And so up until now, the memory of my motorcycle trip has sat dormant in a deconstructed state across a hard drive, Google, and the back of my own mind.
It's hard to put "vibe coding" into words but to me it evokes the same visceral intuitive state as riding a motorcycle. Looking for ways to utilize my new Claude subscription, last week I gave it a link to the Google Maps coordinates for my trip and, just like that, the tires started rotating and we were off.
No thinking. No planning. Just a high-level definition of constraints and possibilities guiding the general direction of travel. Knowing when to keep pushing or stop riding and take a break. Each collaborative iteration getting you another mile closer to the eventual destination.
Which in this instance turned out to be something that just a couple of weeks ago I never could have imagined existing—a scroll-driven interactive documentary that brings together and organizes all the deconstructed components of my years-dormant trip into a single unified thing, that I am now sharing for anyone who might be interested.
Tech: 118k line KML · Single HTML file · Vanilla JS · Leaflet
Links to the site and source are in the comments.