Hey HN,

After years of false starts learning to code (pure math background, but got stuck in tutorial hell), I finally shipped something real with Claude Code as my patient tutor.

The problem: Most guys have terrible dating profile photos. Poor lighting, bad angles, unflattering composition. Men generally don't like taking pics, so our photos suck.

My solution: Built a pipeline that takes uploaded photos and enhances them specifically for dating apps by tying AI tools together. Trying different things but had the most success with training flux and using enhancor or kontext for skin texture (and midjourney for minor editing).

Tech stack: Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS frontend, Netlify Functions backend, Cloudinary for storage, Google Sheets as database. No frameworks - kept it simple to actually finish something.

(I also tried Tailwind with CSS but that eventually caused build conflicts, so I removed it and wrote everything in pure CSS. Lesson learned.)

The learning curve was steep, but Claude Code answered literally hundreds of basic questions. I used todo folders to save context between sessions and screenshot folders for debugging help. Some other things too but with the pace of innovation, many of those are already outdated.

Took about two months to get it all working. Mostly just happy to have shipped something and "vibelearned." Hoping that by shipping and learning incrementally, I can tackle more complex projects.

All advice for this new indie hacker/newbie coder is welcome.

Thanks, RJ