This started as a data puzzle. There is a lot of public data but it's hosted by for-profit companies and the data models don't seem to be coherent (probably lots of good reasons for the data models being the way they are, so no criticism, and it's wonderful they are public.)

So for LA City, they use Socrata (owned by Tyler Technologies -- NYSE: TYL) to host and publish open data. LA City also uses Esri's ArcGIS for geo-based data.

So behind the scenes there is my code that builds a parquet database of * MyLA311 service requests * Permits * Construction Enforcement * Crime * Parcels Id with Polygons * Lidar

So that part was a typical data-munging exercise, and it was fun & interesting to me to learn how public entities try and deal with IT budget cuts and service the community, etc. (For example, 311 requests for homeless issues are transferred to another department, so they all look they are closed immediately, but I never could find the agency data that ultimately resolved that type of request.)

So I have a pile of data that is organized in a way that makes sense to me, but I could not build an interface that I liked.

So I asked Claude to create a fly-over visualization to see what it could do with this data, and it blew my mind.

I'm a life-long coder and I'm old, so it's an interesting experience to see how good these models and coding harnesses are, and how quickly they are improving.

As to what makes this HN worthy? I enjoyed playing with the interface, and there might be more people than just me who love LA (warts and all) and its history and architecture. So it's interesting and I'm not asking for anything in return, so for me that satisfies the "HN Show" criteria.

The deeper question for me right now is what does hacking mean when the coding is done by these systems? It's a different kind of hacking, and its makes things possible that impossible before, but it's a million miles away from 6502 assembly.