(updated April 5, 2026) — vinylAIcollecting
I'm a software engineer by trade, so when I decided to build a site to catalog my growing vinyl collection, using AI to help felt like a natural fit. What you're looking at right now — VinylVault — was built in conversation with Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant. And I mean that literally. I was preserving records while we built this thing.
I recently got a Spin Clean record washer for my birthday, and I've been working my way through the collection — washing each record, swapping out old paper sleeves for fresh inner sleeves, and making sure everything is stored properly. Between wash and sleeve cycles, I'd hop back to the chat, tweak a feature, fix a bug, or talk through the next piece of the site.
A big part of what I've been cleaning and cataloging is inherited vinyl — records from my parents and my in-laws. There haven't been any jaw-dropping rare finds yet, but honestly, the best part has been revisiting the records I listened to growing up. Pulling them out of the crate, giving them a wash, and hearing them again on my own turntable — that's been the real reward.
As a developer, building with AI was a pretty seamless experience. It's not magic — you still need to know what you're asking for and how to steer it — but the speed at which you can go from idea to working feature is something else. VinylVault went from nothing to a fully functional site with Discogs integration, stats, a blog, and more, all in a single session.
So if this site feels a little personal, that's because it is. It was built one record at a time.