There's a lot of gubbins about AI making you more productive more efficient, more amazing but what interests me is whether it can help push my ideas into new spaces. I'm a professional editorial illustrator. I've spent 30 years making images for the likes of The Economist, The Guardian, the FT and the New York Times. The job is essentially this — take a complex idea and distil it into something simple, clear and immediate. One strong, simple idea. I can't code. But I had a simple idea and I wanted to see if I could make it real with the help of this new technology. Every week I play six-a-side with a group of, erm, ahem, varying ages, skills and abilities. Every week someone, normally me or some other poor sod, has to sort the teams. Get it wrong and you're hearing about it for weeks. I wanted an app that could fix that. Rate your squad across six categories, select who's playing, click a button. Two balanced teams. Done. So I just did that. With a lot of help from Claude Code. The technology didn't make it. I made it. But there's absolutely no way I could have done it without it. That dialogue between myself and the ideas I had and the technology, has been one of the most fascinating creative experiences I've had in years. The same instinct that drives my illustration work drove this. Reduce the idea down to the simplest possible thing. Make it do one job and do it really well. It's called Lazy Gaffer. It's live on the App Store and at lazygaffer.com with a free 14-day trial. Pass it on to any disgruntled gaffer who's fed up cobbling together two teams for the weekly five-a-side.

Lazy Gaffer

Rate and pick two perfectly balanced teams every single time

Rate and pick two perfectly balanced teams every single time