[disconcision]

I actually did something similar recently for my website* and it was actually a Claude failure case; helped a little but ultimately cost me more time than doing it entirely myself. For my version I wanted the actual book spine images; since there's no database for these, I took pictures of my shelves (milkcrates) and wanted clickable regions. I also wanted the spines to link to a reasonable webpage for the book, falling back to goodreads if nothing else was available.

It was very surprising to me that claude wasn't very good at even the latter. It took several rounds of prompt refinement, including very detailed instructions, to get even 75% non-broken links, from ~30% on first attempt. It really liked to hallucinate goodreads URLs with the book title in them but an invalid ID (the title part of URLs is ignored by goodreads).

The former was less surprising... It attempted a very rough manual strategy for generating superimposed SVG outlines on the books, which often started okay but by the right side of the the image often didn't even intersect the actual spines. I tried to verbally coax it into using a third party segmenter, but with no luck. We eventually found a binary search style iterative cropping strategy that worked well but was taking 6 minutes and nearly a couple dollars per spine so I killed that and just did the SVG outlines in figma myself.

* https://andrewblinn.com scroll down to find the bookcase and drag down on it to zoom and unlock the books