Peptide Signal
peptidesignal.orgPeptide Signal is an idea inspired by my friend and sometimes-co-founder who has been injecting himself with BPC-157 for joint healing and thinks I should too (I'm not going to 🙂).
Peptides are having a moment in Silicon Valley. Odd Lots recently published an episode about the grey market for peptides, and Reddit is full of people talking about what they're injecting, stacking, and experimenting with. But the conversation is almost entirely anecdotal. There's no clear way to tell how many people are actually using these peptides, which benefits are most commonly reported, or (more importantly) which side effects or scary adverse reactions are showing up.
The goal of this project is to turn that unstructured discussion into something that can be analyzed and compared. It was also a way to test what tools like claude code can realistically handle, and a hands-on way for me to learn how to design and ship a full data pipeline. The concept for the product is two parts:
- •Scrape sub-reddits to quantify the number of unique posters reporting positive impacts, and negative or dangerous side effects
- •Once some data is available on the site and users are visiting - prompt people to fill out a short questionnaire on their own experience
This was my first coding project. I sent about 1000 screenshots to chatgpt saying "where do I click" and "what's this error" (before switching to claude code). Follow my journey below:
After the pipeline was working and all 29K posts had been processed through Gemini, I did some security checks and published to peptidesignal.org using Vercel. I'm not sure if this product will actually be useful to anyone, but it was a fun way to learn about how to build with claude code, and more importantly where it breaks. The hallucination problem was something I should have expected, but still caught me off guard. Claude code works so well most of the time that it's easy to forget it can fail silently.