I make Tabby, a free tab manager for Chrome, Firefox and Edge. This week I shipped version 1.2 and made a "lock in" short for TikTok and YouTube in three languages.
I barely wrote code for any of it. Mostly I talked to Claude Code in plain Vietnamese ("this looks ugly", "the text is cut off", "the music is wrong"), looked at what it showed me, and said yes or no.
People keep asking me three things: how long it takes, whether it actually works, and what it costs. So here are my real numbers, plus the times it misunderstood me.
🎬 1.2 video: https://youtu.be/rFEa6yeJnX8
🎬 The short: English · 日本語 · ä¸æ–‡
What got done
Tabby 1.2:
- 29 themes, 6 of them free (Graphite, Catppuccin, Dracula, Zen Garden, Sakura, Capy Chill)
- 12 languages
- a calmer board and a new Home page
- new store pages in every language
- a 51-second promo video
The "lock in" short: someone fills a year of work into Tabby, one line at a time, cut to the beat. It ships in English, Japanese and Chinese, each in a different theme.
How long, and how much talking
| Time | My messages | Tokens | Cost at API prices* | Versions thrown away | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tabby 1.2, plan to release | about 1 day (Oct 22 night → Oct 23 evening) | 58 | 888M | ~$316 | 0 (fixed in review rounds) |
| Lock-in short: plan, 3 versions, 2 more languages, posting | about 3.5 hours | 45 | 207M | ~$55 | 2 |
| The whole project so far (since Oct 5) | 19 days | 546 | 2.5B | ~$909 |
* I worked this out from the token counts in Claude Code's logs, priced at Opus API list prices. I'm on Claude Max, a flat monthly plan, so this isn't what I paid. It's what the same work would cost through the API. Most of those tokens are Claude re-reading the project, which is billed at the cheap cached rate.
For scale, 58 messages is about one long chat with a friend.
What came out of it (so far)
- 141 users on the Chrome and Firefox stores, 19 days after the first line of code. Rating 5.0 from 3 reviews.
- 3.4K views and 6.7 hours of watch time on YouTube.
- About $6 of API-priced AI time per user so far ($909 ÷ 141).
- On the short, one message from me every ~5 minutes (45 in 3.5 hours). Claude did the rest.
It's early, and these are small numbers. But this is one person, and the "team" is a chat window.
How I actually work with it
- I say what I want like I'd say it to a person. "Make a version in Japanese and Chinese, different themes, and a more positive hook." No specs.
- It plans first, and I approve the plan. Early on it changed my website before I'd seen the plan. Now there's a rule in its memory file: show the plan, wait for my OK, then build.
- It shows me, not tells me. Screenshots, a 2-second demo clip, a page with the options drawn side by side. I can judge a picture in five seconds.
- It reviews itself before I see it. For the big parts, I let a second Claude review the first one's work and score it. They went back and forth until it hit 9–10/10. One night I said "review it to 10/10, then build it" and went to sleep. In the morning it was done.
Where it got me wrong, and how we found out
1. "The fonts don't match the design."
I noticed every theme looked slightly off. Claude compared each screen against the design, one by one, and found that the app's font had never loaded. Not in any theme, not since day one. Chrome's own default style was quietly winning.
- Who found it: I did, by looking. All the automatic tests had passed.
- Fix: one rule, the same morning.
- Lesson: tests check that things work, not that they look right. Look at it yourself.
2. A button was cut off in Vietnamese.
It looked fine in English. In Vietnamese the third button fell off the edge.
- Who found it: I did.
- Fix: Claude fixed the button. It also added a check that opens every screen at phone width in all 12 languages and fails if anything sticks out.
- Lesson: one bug report becomes a test, so the same bug can't come back.
3. The short: it made an ad. I wanted a vibe.
I showed it a trending TikTok. Its first two versions filmed the whole app, with lots of lines popping in at once. They were accurate, and nobody could read them on a phone.
- Why it got it wrong: it was trying to show off the product. The trend only works when you see one line being typed, close up, and the app stays in the background.
- How I fixed it: I sent one screenshot of a video with 7k likes and said "like this, never the whole dashboard". I also asked it to write that down as a rule.
- Result: version 3 got it right, and the Japanese and Chinese versions needed no changes from me.
4. The music was the wrong song.
It found the trending sound on TikTok. That turned out to be a sped-up re-upload, not the original.
- Who found it: I did. It just sounded off.
- Fix: I sent YouTube links to the originals. It re-measured the beat and moved every cut onto the new beats. One version still had the drop 0.2 s early, and Claude caught that itself on review.
5. It said too much.
An early cut had a caption: "so I locked in". I said: show, don't tell. Now the only words on screen are a browser tab title at the start and the link at the end.
What I'd tell anyone trying this
- Your job becomes taste and saying no. Most of my 58 messages were "no, because…" or "yes, do it".
- Make it show you a small demo before it builds the big thing. A 2-second clip saves an hour of wrong renders.
- When it gets something wrong, ask it to write the lesson down. Then you only have to say it once.
- Look at the result yourself. Every important bug here was found by a human looking, not by a test.
- Count the cost in your time, not only in dollars. 103 messages from me covered a release and four videos.
Tabby is free with no account: https://tabby.taewoo.me/?s=devto
If you work with an AI agent too, how do you stop it from building the wrong thing?
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