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 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.
It worked really well:
- GitHub repo allowed iteration and refining from my phone using a Cloud instance of Claude, while on deck with SLR in other hand
- Markdown file acted as “living document” in my phone browser
- Claude fearlessly dissected swim-domain-specific format to extract information I wanted (swimming time standards in a weird binary format)
- All we learned is memorialized and ready for future swim meets
It was all pages out of my vibe coding playbook, applied to a different domain entirely.
But, there are some lessons learned in here that I suspect will generalize for me:
Day 1 (too much human): Borrow fancy lens, fumble around with it, go home frustrated and cook up this plan 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 (optimized middle): 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.)
