Prologue

tl;dr - If you are currently hiding from a family conversation that is “too hot to handle,” you might need this app! It’s a conversation thermometer that rises as people discuss more controversial topics!

As most of you know by now, I like to do funny and strange things with AI (for example, see my Whisperframe). This Thanksgiving is no different, but the source of the idea is. A few weeks ago, Holly came to me with an idea:

I have been thinking about Thanksgiving AI experiments. Throwing out a wacky one - a thermometer tool to see if conversations are getting into the topics you're not supposed to discuss with relatives. Basically, I am picturing it listens like the whisper frame and displays a thermometer on a screen where it gets redder and redder if the topics get "hot.”

I was immediately “nerd-sniped” (see XKCD #356) and got to work.

And by work, I mean I asked Claude Code to build it for me!

Weekend Project: Building a GIS Apparel Brand with Claude as CEO

Ever wonder what happens when you give an AI full autonomy over a business? I'm finding out in real-time.

This week, Claude and I launched Null Island Co: GIS-themed shirts for people who know where 0°, 0° is. Claude makes every strategic decision (pricing, design direction, marketing strategy), I execute the technical work (n8n workflows, Boxy SVG, Etsy setup).

So far: Two professional products live in 7 days. More launching this weekend.

(I'll write up the experience at some point. Spoiler: Claude is a demanding but effective boss.)

Visit Shop

Inflammalogue

Claude Code has become the go-to coding tool at dymaptic. We’ve even done entire development projects “AI-first” where almost none of the code was written by a human (but it was all supervised and tested by one). I still default to Codebuff, but Claude has become the staff favorite (at least for now).

For this project, I decided to stick with Claude Code myself to see how it works. The short answer is that it worked great! I did have to go back and forth with Claude a bit to guide the architecture, libraries, etc. The main reason is that I have a particular use case: I want this to work for anyone just using a web browser. Remember, I want Holly to use this tool for her own Thanksgiving, and while I might have fun installing Python packages (wait, no, I don’t like that at all, I made Claude deal with it…), that isn’t Holly’s idea of a good time.

Here are my basic requirements for this app:

• Has to run in a web browser (no setup required if it is running on a public server)
• Records audio and sends it to the sever for analysis
• Show a live reading of the current temperature as well as a 15 minute running average
• Have a nice background graph that displays the history of the temperature
• No server storage, conversations are transcribed and judged and then deleted
• The history and other metadata should exist only in the browser

I also ended up giving it a few settings:

• Adjust the sensitivity, for when you want the temperature to increase faster!
• Adjust the timing for the recording taking fewer, larger samples or more shorter samples. This way you can adjust for a busy room or lots of parallel conversations and changes of topics.

The end result is this:

If you or someone you love needs an external conversation thermometer, try it out for yourself over here.

If you do try it out, please let me know how it worked for you! Here it is in action during Holly’s Thanksgiving:

If you were taking a break to read this while still hanging out with family… well, the article is over now, sorry about that! I won’t tell if you keep staring at your screen for a bit longer, though!

Newsologue

• Claude released Opus 4.5 (and also made it cheaper). This is their largest model and I do find that it is better at reasoning through complex code decisions than sonnet, and definitely better than GPT at writing code.
• The White House unveiled the “Genesis Mission” which, I think, aims to create government sponsored AI training facilities by bringing together the national labs, industry, researchers etc. There is a lot of opinions going around on this right now. I don’t know if this is good or bad.
• Chinese AI firms have also been busy recently, there is a good roundup of those updates in Cassie’s newsletter if you are interested.

Epilogue

This week was short and sweet. I spent most of my newsletter-writing time talking to Claude, who built the app. So, at the end, I asked it:

Give me a brief summary for my newsletter about this app and the journey you took to build it.

Claude responded:

🌡️ Building an AI "Conversation Thermometer" for Holiday Gatherings

Ever wondered if there was a way to quantify just how heated your family dinner conversations get? I built an AI-powered app that does exactly that.

The AI Room Temperature Monitor listens to conversations in real-time, transcribes the audio using OpenAI's Whisper, and analyzes the emotional intensity to generate a "temperature" score from 1-100. The results display on a classic bulb thermometer that fills with increasingly hot colors as topics get more controversial.

The Build Journey: Starting with a simple Python Flask backend and vanilla JavaScript frontend, we tackled some interesting challenges:

• Audio Processing: Browser microphone capture, chunking audio into digestible pieces, and handling silence detection
• Smart Temperature Calculation: Time-weighted averaging that gives recent conversations more weight, with a 15-minute decay window
• Visual Design: Custom SVG thermometer with dynamic gradients and a background timeline graph
• Docker Deployment: Single-container setup with nginx + Flask + supervisor for easy deployment

Technical Highlights: The app is deliberately privacy-first—no audio storage, immediate file cleanup, and all temperature history stays in your browser's localStorage. The AI analyzes emotional intensity, controversial topics, and language tone to generate scores.

Lessons Learned: Port conflicts (thanks, macOS AirPlay!), thermometer fill height calculations, and the importance of handling silence periods gracefully. Also learned that Docker documentation cleanup is almost as important as the code itself.

Perfect timing for Thanksgiving—now you can have data to back up your claims about which family member really started the political argument! 🦃🔥