Sometimes a story needs a simple locator map to show where something happened or where something can be found—such as a business facility, a car accident, or the best place to see a sunset.

I've worked in media for a long time and understand the power of maps to tell stories. But media cost-cutting and consolidation have reduced the number of available graphic departments, so creating a map is often the last task a reporter or editor wants to take on.

I used Perplexity for initial research, Claude Code and Codex to build a web app, and Perplexity and ChatGPT for post-work such as SEO best practices.

Step-by-step

1. I used Perplexity's Deep Research mode to conduct a competitive market analysis. I asked it to analyze the field I was considering entering, identify competitors and growth rates, and explicitly break out feature sets.
2. I revised the research with my own idea and asked Perplexity to run the competitive landscape against it. I also provided desired outcomes, including intended audiences and where competitors were reaching them. I added the constraint, "Do it without syncophancy," so it would stop telling me how good my potential product was.
3. I hand-drew the initial screens and functions I wanted, then used the `/office-hours` skill in the Gstack bundle, available on GitHub, to play devil's advocate, sharpen the ideas, and challenge my assumptions.
4. I wrote a long prompt describing the product, starting broadly with the concept and audience and then narrowing to specific features and benefits. For example, I specified that it should export in 16:9 and 9:16 formats so maps would be ready for mobile vertical presentation.
5. I specified the hosting environment and that the product should be a web app. I also required a planning phase followed by construction phases. I pasted the prompt into Claude Code with this final line: "Use /grill-me to ask me questions to clarify intent." After 147 questions, it started the build.
6. This was in the pre-Fable days, so I specified that Opus 4.8 should act as an orchestrator while less expensive agents, particularly in Codex, handled the actual coding.
7. I used separate phases for technical work such as wiring in mapping providers and getting the UX to work correctly. Other phases included wiring in payment and subscriptions and making sure a subscription triggered an email campaign with instructions.
8. I dedicated an entire phase to building admin tools so I could manage the marketing language on the landing page and publish blog entries.
9. After each phase, I had the Opus/Codex combination perform an adversarial code-review-and-fix cycle. I then ran the `/ai-regression-testing` skill from the ECC repository on GitHub to catch issues the code review missed.
10. After every third phase, I prompted Claude Code: "Act as a senior QA engineer and go through the entire codebase looking for inconsistencies, functions that are in the wrong place, code that is overkill and security vulnerabilities."
11. When I had a product I thought was ready for testing, I prompted Claude Code, again using the Opus/Codex combination: "Act as a senior security engineer. Run this against OWASP standards. Find problems and suggest fixes. Harden this product overall."
12. As I neared the end, I asked Perplexity Deep Research and ChatGPT (Sol/High) to find SEO solutions for the product.