Lately there's been a lot going on in the industry. You see it everywhere. Big companies making moves, things shifting around. Enough noise to make me pause for a bit so it felt like a good excuse to just build something small again.

So... I built a tiny thing today. Nothing fancy, just me poking at the Anthropic API to see how it feels outside of a chat window.

The idea's simple: every day it generates a motivational quote tied to something that happened in history on that date. You load the page, it hits Claude, gets a quote, caches it, and shows it in a small terminal-style UI.

Under the hood it's just a single flow: check if today's quote exists, otherwise generate it, store it in TinyDB, return it. I cached it so I don't accidentally burn money on Anthropic. I used claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 which is the tiniest one since this only needs one call per day at most, even if people hit the page multiple times.

Cost-wise it's basically negligible. Each request is around ~400 tokens total, which comes out to roughly $0.002/day or under $0.06/month ($0.08 AUD/month). And that's worst case. With caching and a fallback to hardcoded quotes, it barely touches the API at all. I just don't like that there isn't any spending limits based on the API token, apparently it's per "workspace".

So anyway, the stack is intentionally boring. Flask, TinyDB, gunicorn, Docker, Nginx. Python because I haven't touched it in a while.

Well… technically I didn't touch much code either.

The app is live at motivation.katpadi.ph.

Small project, shipped! I guess that was the point.