I Built an EPL Match Prediction Service Solo with Claude Code (and I'm Not Really a Frontend Dev)

chic.alors93 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:16:41 +0000

I'm a backend-leaning developer working at an ed-tech company in Korea. I wanted to build something on the side — a football prediction service for the English Premier League. The problem? I hate writing CSS. I'm slow at React. And I had maybe 2–3 hours a week to work on it.

So I leaned fully into vibe coding with Claude Code. Here's what happened.

What I Built

XKick is an AI-powered EPL match prediction service. Every matchday, it:

Pulls live match data from the API-Football / AllFootball APIs
Runs a prediction model based on recent form, lineup data, player grades, and historical stats
Generates match insights and predicted lineups
Shows win probabilities for each fixture

The stack: FastAPI + PostgreSQL on the backend, Next.js on the frontend. Deployed on a VPS. Built almost entirely through Claude Code sessions.

My Workflow

I run everything inside cmux (a terminal multiplexer) with tmux panes. One pane for Claude Code, one for the dev server, one for logs.

My typical session looks like this:

Open Claude Code in a tmux pane
Describe what I want: "Add a data pipeline that syncs player grades after each matchday and stores them in the lineup_predictions table"
Claude writes the code, runs tests, fixes errors
I review the diff and either approve or tweak the prompt

That's basically it. I'm not writing code from scratch — I'm directing.

The Part That Surprised Me

The biggest win wasn't speed. It was data integrity.

At one point I had a nasty bug: mixed fixture IDs from two different data sources (FD and AF) were colliding in my matches table. Predictions were running against the wrong matches. Six thousand rows of bad data.

I described the problem to Claude Code. It:

Diagnosed the root cause (ID namespace collision)
Wrote a full reset pipeline (full_reset_af.py) — 11 steps covering schema reset, team/match import, player sync, events, lineups, grades, simulation, insights, translation, prediction evaluation, params rebuild, and lineup prediction backfill
Ran the whole thing and verified row counts at each step

That would have taken me a full weekend alone. With Claude Code, it took one session.

What Claude Code Is (and Isn't)

It's not magic. You still need to:

Understand the architecture well enough to describe what you want
Review every diff — Claude makes mistakes, especially with complex joins or multi-step transactions
Know when something is overcomplicated and push back

What it removes: the friction of translating intent into boilerplate. The "I know what this should do but I don't want to write the migration" problem. That's gone.

The Honest Numbers

Time to MVP: ~3 weeks of evenings and weekends
Lines of code written by hand: maybe 5%
Bugs introduced by Claude: yes, several — but it also fixed most of them
Would I do it again: absolutely

Try It

If you're into EPL, check out xkick.app before the next matchday. Predictions go up a day before kickoff.

And if you're a developer curious about vibe coding as a real workflow (not just a demo), happy to answer questions in the comments.

Tags: claudecode, ai, sideproject, webdev, football

P.S. This article was also written by Claude. Vibe coding goes all the way down.