Should I or Shouldn’t I? Coding with Claude for Post-Pros Part 2

Series	Coding with Claude

How I built a tool to solve a common turnover problem, and why I’m giving it away for free

While prepping a feature-length documentary for turnover to picture and sound at a London post house, I came up against a delivery request that made me crack open Claude and build a custom solution to save myself many hours of manual labour.

The request? A list of every re-frame, speed ramp, stabilization, rotation, and other minor change that had been made to the picture during the offline edit, so that the online artist could ensure everything was as it should be. With thousands of shots and – given it’s a documentary – a ton of repositioning work on almost every shot, this could take hours, if not days, to compile by hand.

In this article, I’ll walk through the solution I built – XML Parser – the work I put into it, and why I’m now making it freely available to the Mixing Light community. But the more useful question isn’t whether I could build it – vibe-coding makes that almost too easy. It’s whether I should have, and how you can answer that for yourself before you sink your own hours into a half-built idea.

Plus, my closing thought presents a challenge to the community…

Key Takeaways

By the end of this Insight, you should understand how to:

Related Mixing Light Insights

An Object Lesson on the Future of Post-Production Workflows

They say that third-act problems are really first-act problems. When the story doesn’t end well, it’s because it wasn’t set up properly in the beginning. The same goes for vibe-coded apps.

While I researched whether there was demand for XML Parser, I failed to research whether similar apps already existed. They do, and better too. But we’ll come back to that.