How a visually impaired engineer builds personal software with Claude Code + Wispr Flow

Right before I started college, I ended up losing most of my central vision due to a rare genetic disorder called Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy. I was talking with someone who was losing their sight recently from the same disease, and they were asking about different things, and I was like, "Oh, you can just do all of that now with Gemini or ChatGPT." The world is a whole lot easier.

So you're gonna show us some of the things that you've built for yourself.

So when someone sends me an image, I use this tool to be able to get the gist of an image without needing to ask somebody to explain it to me. If I hit Control + Shift + D on any message, it's gonna pop up and go off and describe that image for me. And the cool thing is, I can go ask some follow-ups. What age child is this for? And it will head off to ChatGPT and get the response for this as well.

I'm curious for you, what are you most excited about in the multimodal world of AI?

One thing that I was always afraid of: Can I read stories? I can memorize stories, I can tell stories, but your son being like, "I want to read this book," and you having to be like, "Sorry, I can't." And now that, "Sorry, I can't," becomes, "Sorry, I can," with the assistance of so many different tools now.

[upbeat music] Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have Joe McCormick, principal software engineer at Babylist, who has a vision impairment, and he's gonna show us how he uses AI to build micro Chrome apps to make his everyday life and work a lot more accessible. You're gonna learn how to use Claude Code to write Chrome apps, and you're gonna be inspired at the little things you can do to make your own Slack a little bit more efficient. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Tines, the intelligent workflow platform powering the world's most important work. Business moves faster than the systems meant to support it. Teams are stuck with repetitive tasks, scattered tools, and hard-to-reach data. AI has huge promise, but struggles when everything underneath is fragmented. Tines fixes that. It unifies your tools, data, and processes in one secure, flexible platform, blending agentic AI, automation, and human-led intervention. Teams get their time back, workflows run smarter, and AI actually delivers real value. Customers now automate over one point five billion actions every week. Tines is trusted by companies like Canva, Coinbase, Databricks, GitLab, Mars, and Reddit. Try Tines at tines.com/howiai. Joe, thanks for joining How I AI, and I want you to spend a little bit of time introducing yourself and your story, and how AI has impacted your ability to do work and build interesting things, and engage in lots of awesome projects, and what's different about your life now with AI versus before?