Could be “hammer, nail.” But.. it felt obvious that the best way to plan and execute being ESWIM Club Photographer for a swim meet, optimizing for a specific set of goals, was to give Claude a bunch of context, activate Planning Mode and brainstorm. Then use Markdown on GitHub as a collaborative “surface” to optimize the shoot in realtime while running the pool deck.
My input context to the agent: “heat sheets” showing who’s swimming when and in which lanes, which side of the pool is easiest to navigate, some ‘banger’ shots I wanted to try for, etc.
The key outcome was a chronological “game day cheat sheet” on my phone. Benefits:
- GitHub repo allowed iteration and refining from my phone using a “remote control” Cloud instance of Claude, on deck with SLR in other hand
- Markdown file acted as “living document” in my phone browser
- Claude fearlessly dissected swim-meet-domain-specific file formats to extract information I wanted (swimming time standards in a weird binary format)
- All we learned is memorialized and ready for future swim meets
All of that was essentially pages from my vibe coding playbook, applied to a different domain entirely.
There are some lessons learned in here that I suspect will generalize for me:
Day 1 (too much human): Rent fancy lens, fumble around, go home frustrated and cook up this plan while commiserating with Claude
Day 2 (too much agent): Execute a ton of technical shots, frantically try to “catch ’em all” and largely succeed, feel great in the moment ….. but get frustrated again while editing in LightRoom, feeling like I missed all the personal moments. Refine the .md file to add the emotional moments I wanted to catch, and the WHY BOTHER to complement the WHAT.
Day 3 (storyteller): Shoot as AI-empowered storyteller, end happy.
I know a lot of folks won’t want to use this set of tooling and that’s perfectly fine. But it worked incredibly for me in Feb 2026.
Pics or it obviously didn’t happen! (shared humbly – this is the start of my swim photographer journey; I’m working on it, folks.)
[june 2026 edit: this is in need of a follow-up as this has become a huge source of inspiration for me on the AI front and otherwise. more pics here; tech notes to come]
