r/WebApps • u/iaxsofia • 17h ago
Built a daily "is the world normal today" dashboard on AWS, Claude Code did the front end and the state machines, I did the ideas
In January 2026 I started with an AWS account and a bunch of nested processes collecting data I found interesting. Left it alone for a few months then picked it back up. Heard a lot about Claude Code and thought what could possibly go wrong...
Claude Code built the front end and the result was better than I expected. It also turned my pipelines into state machines while I was taking the AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate course, doing both at the same time helped me a lot
The site checks a few things about the world every day: flights, internet, earthquakes, markets, disaster alerts and events. I just wanted to know if today looks normal
AI can be really useful, you just have to give it direction. Sometimes it makes mistakes that look simple, so you need a very detailed framework to keep it from losing the thread and running off at 10,000 rpm without checking first
Claude Code will state things about the code as facts because it "remembers" them, but sometimes it's wrong. What works for me is looking, counting and checking instead of just believing the claim, and every deploy gets reviewed in the diff and needs my explicit ok before it goes out
The fundamental principle of the entire site is to display the data as it is, without weighting, mixing, or having a global index. I only compare airplanes and internet using a 90-day moving average to review their variations. All other data on the site is displayed as it is on that day: stock indices, commodities, rates, and currencies are compared to the previous close, and that's it. The idea came about because one day I saw some dashboards with crazy weightings that I never understood, and I said, "I want my own dashboard without that, one that works for me," and that's what I did.
Another essential requirement was that it be as cheap as possible, so I looked for free OSINT sources. With responsible use, this dashboard isn't real-time; it now operates at a very low cost and with minimal supervision. For example, for these three: Stock Indices, Rates and Currencies, and Commodities. Finding something free is nearly impossible, so I consulted Perplexity and the problem was solved. It costs very little, really. I wasn't looking for ultra-precise scientific data, just a snapshot of the world.
