News · New this week
Screen Time Roast: a phone hours roaster built with Claude
A one-page app that roasts your screen time app by app, checks your maths, and keeps your numbers on your phone.
Screen Time Roast takes the hours from your phone's Screen Time page and makes fun of them. You type the numbers, tap roast me, and every app gets its own line. It's a small build, and a tidy example of asking Claude for one web page.
What the app does
Every day a spin wheel picks an app for me to build, and there are no second spins. This time it landed on Screen Time Roast.
The flow is short. Open Screen Time, type your total and your per-app hours into the page, then tap roast me. In the reel, the test run shows ten and a half hours on a phone in a single day. The hours in the video are test numbers, so don't read them as a real person's day.
The roasts are per app. Four and a half hours on Instagram gets "the algorithm knows you better than your mom." Three and a half hours of BGMI gets "winner winner, no dinner," plus a note that mom called four times. Two hours on YouTube means you watched how to stop procrastinating, twice. Forty minutes on LinkedIn means you're thrilled to announce you opened it once.
The maths check
The part I like most is the sanity check. After the roasts, the app adds up your per-app hours and compares them to the total you entered. If the apps add up to more than the total, it calls you out. Even your screen time is lying.
That's a small piece of validation, but it makes the output feel like it read your input instead of filling in a template. Any form that takes a total and a breakdown can do the same.
The last line is a Hinglish verdict: "phone ne tumhe use kiya hai, tumne phone ko nahi." Roughly, the phone used you, you didn't use the phone.
How it was built
I told Claude, an AI coder, to build it as one web page. That's the whole architecture. There's no server, so your numbers never leave your phone. For an app that asks you to type your most embarrassing habit into a box, that's the right default.
A single page also keeps the build small. There's nothing to deploy beyond the page itself, and nothing to secure on the back end because there isn't one.
What to do with it
If you want to try the same approach, pick a toy idea with one input form and one funny output, and ask for it as a single web page. Add one validation rule, like the totals check here, so the result reacts to what people typed.
Comment ROAST on the reel and I'll send you the link. Then send it to the friend who says "bas five minute" and scrolls for three hours.
