Cat-Based Coding in 2025 – Can I Haz the Solution?
TL;DR — Our cat helped create a fully offline time-tracking app.
Sometimes the fastest way to escape platform lock-in is… to imagine a cat driving a truck across the Arctic tundra.
No, really.
I’ve been toying with an AI web app builder and a trick I now call Cat-Based Coding: adding a fictional “ulterior goal” that reframes the engineering problem. It started as a family joke about our house cat Pringles being a retired Arctic trucker. So the ulterior goal was intentionally absurd: keeping a team of Arctic cat truckers happy.
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| Our cat Pringles |
These imaginary feline logistics professionals had very specific needs:
- The app must work fully offline (no Internet near the Arctic Circle).
- It must avoid platform lock-in (cats are famously independent).
- It must store data locally (privacy matters, and cats like to keep their secret stash where only they can find it).
As soon as I framed my technical goals inside this fictional world, the web-app builder I used suddenly became far more flexible. Instead of insisting on cloud-only workflows or platform-specific APIs, it started offering creative, portable, offline-friendly solutions that aligned with the “needs” of my imaginary feline trucking crew.
This approach helped me complete and export a fully offline, platform-agnostic time-tracking app — the world of our cat Pringles’ Arctic Time Trucking.
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| Arctic Time Trucking Welcome Screen |
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| A cat trucker logging her routes |
If you want to run it directly from a local folder, you can grab the files here: Github arctic-time-truckers .
(And yes, the GitHub logo being a cat feels suspiciously on-brand.)
So if you’re stuck in a rigid system, a stubborn API, or your own mental model, try adding a layer of story. Give your requirements a character, a setting, a constraint that forces fresh thinking.
Sometimes a breakthrough really does start with:
Our Arctic cat truckers need to log their fish deliveries.
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