Guitar lessons with Roku and Claude · Neal Shyam

Guitar lessons with Roku and Claude

August 10, 2026

After 15 years, I’m playing the guitar again. My daughter Rumi loves it. One strum of Wheels on the Bus and Dad’s a rock star. It gives me life.

The problem is my repertoire is limited to two songs. I only remember four chords. And I have no rhythm.

Because I can’t leave well enough alone, I created a Roku app which displays chords & lyrics for nursery rhymes on TV. It’s got an audio/visual metronome, autoscrolls long songs, supports dark mode, and you can swap out barre chords for easier open chords.

Try it out. It’s free: Kids Guitar Singalong

Here’s a demo with barre chord substitution (F → Fmaj7):

During COVID I built (and sold) some Roku apps, but it took weeks to get up and running. The tools, docs, and BrightScript dev experience were a grind. This time around, I knew Claude would do the heavy lifting. But the hacker in me gets carried away and needed some product & time management:

Start with a simple, clear goal: “Guitar chords and lyrics on TV.”

Claude and I chatted through a spec and I took a day to sleep on it.

I tried some alternatives and tried to talk myself out of a build. Did it anyway.

One hard constraint for Claude: “Don’t deploy or test on the TV during the day—unless I’m actively user testing.”

And one for myself: “You only have 1-2 hours a day to work on this project.”

Once the spec was done, development ran Jul 31–Aug 3. Total time was 28 hours over 132 turns. MVP was ready in 6 hours on day 1. The remaining 22 hours were spent on polish (dark mode, the metronome), bug fixes, testing, adding more songs, and pre-submission asset & AWS setup. And I successfully spent less than 2 hours a day talking to Claude, mostly via remote control on my phone.

This experience was fun. I’m proud of myself for limiting scope and my time commitment. I hope other parents will enjoy it too. See you later, it’s time to jam! 🎸🤘🏽

Filed under: hacks, roku, parenting