The problem with finding a home near a good school in Melbourne is that you end up with twenty browser tabs open—Domain on one side, school catchment maps on another, a spreadsheet tracking which properties fall within which zones, and a growing sense that there has to be a better way. As a parent and a dev, I’ve seen both sides of this: the personal frustration of house hunting with school zones in mind, and the technical knowledge that this kind of data integration shouldn’t be this hard in 2025. So I built School Zone Homes VIC, a tool that answers one simple question: show me homes for sale within the catchment areas I care about.

The interesting part isn’t that the tool exists—it’s that I built it entirely with Claude Code, from the first line to deployment, in what would traditionally take a small team several weeks. The site pulls real estate listings from Domain, overlays school catchment boundaries on an interactive map, and lets you filter by enrollment year, school type, property features, and price range. It’s the reverse of Victoria’s “Find My School” tool: instead of entering an address to discover which schools serve it, you start with the schools and find the properties. The shift in perspective matters because that’s how parents actually think about the problem. You don’t randomly pick a house and hope it’s in the right zone—you know which schools you want and work backwards from there.

Working with Claude Code on this project revealed something about how AI-assisted development has evolved beyond autocomplete or answering Stack Overflow questions in your editor. I described what I wanted to build, pointed it at some API documentation, and watched it scaffold a full-stack application with proper error handling, responsive design, and sensible architecture decisions. When I hit integration challenges with the Domain API or needed to optimize the map rendering performance, Claude Code didn’t just suggest fixes—it understood the context of what I was trying to accomplish and proposed solutions that fit the larger system. The experience felt less like debugging with an assistant and more like pair programming with someone who reads documentation faster than you and doesn’t need coffee breaks.

I also experimented with OpenSpec during this project, a tool that helps structure and validate API specifications in ways that make AI-assisted development more reliable. When you’re integrating multiple data sources—property listings, school boundaries, geocoding services—keeping those contracts clear and well-defined prevents the kind of subtle bugs that eat up hours in traditional development. OpenSpec helped a lot here, and there’s enough to say about how it changes the development workflow that it deserves its own post. Consider this the preview.

The broader point is that building useful software is becoming less about knowing every framework and library, and more about clearly articulating what you want to exist and guiding the tools that can help you build it. School Zone Homes VIC serves a real need for Victorian families navigating the intersection of real estate and education, and it went from idea to deployed application in a fraction of the time I would have spent even two years ago. That compression of the build cycle doesn’t just make side projects more feasible—it changes what’s possible when you have a specific problem to solve and limited time to solve it. Which, as a dev and parent, describes most of my weekends.