Simon Willison wires a decade of iNaturalist sightings into his blog via Claude Code

Willison extended his personal blog’s syndication pipeline (“beats”) to ingest wildlife photos from iNaturalist, surfacing them on the homepage, date archives, and search. He built the feature from his phone using Claude Code for web, treating the LLM agent as a remote pair-programmer rather than a local IDE companion.

The back-population is the more interesting move: over a decade of historical sightings were pulled in, so site search now retrieves photos by species — querying “lemur” returns shots from a 2019 Madagascar trip. It’s a small but concrete demonstration of agentic coding being used to bolt durable personal-data pipelines onto an existing site without sitting at a desk.