I recently read this fantastic (if inaccurately titled¹) post: The United States needs fewer bus stops. It immediately set me to wondering how much effort it would take to create a tool that would let a layperson adjust stop spacing and get an idea of the actual impact it might have. One week later, I have a reasonably well-quantified answer:

• 46 commits
• approximately 6 or 7 hours of my own time
• two spousal reprimands for rate maxing her Claude subscription
• 0 hand-written lines of code

I think it’s pretty fun!

Some notes on the dev process:

• For better or for worse, this is an example of the Cambrian software explosion we are all in the middle of. None of the work is beyond my personal capability, but it would have taken orders of magnitude more time to produce this result and therefore would not have happened.
• I don’t think I would have completed this before Opus 4.5 came out - I did some of the work with Gemini² but it was noticeably more likely to get stuck.
• It would take me a minimum of an hour or two of looking up docs, testing and adjusting to get binaries built automatically for 3 OSes on my own. Now it’s literally a one shot prompt.³

If you’d like to try it with one of your local routes, just download it from GitHub.