My aunt made a book for my uncle for Father’s Day. A real one, hardcover, the kind of thing that sits on a coffee table. Inside it are letters my grandfather wrote home from World War II. My cousins sat down with their kids and read them out loud. Some of those letters hadn’t been read by anyone in eighty years.
A few months ago, none of us could read most of them.
I built the thing that made the book possible. And I built it with the same AI everyone spends all day arguing about.
This blog is usually about that argument. Copilots, velocity, what the tools do to engineering, will any of us have jobs in five years. I write about code because code is what I do. This one is different. This is the most personal thing one of these tools has ever done for me, and it has nothing to do with code.
George
My grandfather was George Tracy Butler. He was the everyman GI, the version of the war you don’t see in the miniseries. A drafted kid from New Jersey. His Army serial number literally starts with the digit they used for draftees. He trained with the combat engineers in Colorado, shipped overseas in late 1943, and served with Company B of the 49th Engineers across England, France, Belgium, and Germany. He went in after D-Day. He froze through the Battle of the Bulge. He took shrapnel from a German jet near Cologne and got the Purple Heart for it. He was at the Elbe when his unit met the Russians.
Here is how he described getting wounded, writing home to his sister:
“I just got shot up a little and got a ten-day rest and a purple heart out of it.”
That’s the whole man in one sentence. He wasn’t in Band of Brothers. He was one of the millions who were just in it, and never famous for it, and came home and didn’t talk about it. The flatness of that voice, the cookies and the mail and the weather and a shrug over the worst day of his life, is the most WW2-generation thing I have ever encountered.
He died decades before any of us were born. My mother was still a girl when she lost him. To my generation he was a name, a handful of photographs, and a folded flag. Nobody we could remember.
The box
What we actually had was a box. Around sixty letters and pieces of V-mail, written between 1942 and 1945, in eighty-year-old handwriting that had faded and bled and been crammed into the margins to save paper. Reading a single one took twenty minutes of squinting and guessing. Reading all of them, transcribing them, sorting them by date and place, figuring out which APO address meant he was in North Africa and which meant England: nobody was ever going to do that.
It’s not that it was hard. It’s that it was the kind of project that stays a someday project forever. The letters were going to stay in the box.
How I built it
So I pointed Claude at the box.
The workflow ended up simple. I photographed every page into a folder. Claude read the scans, the actual handwriting, and produced a transcript of each letter. Then I went through behind it and corrected every word against the image, because getting this right mattered more than anything I have ever built. These are a real person’s words. I was not going to enshrine a machine’s guess as my grandfather’s voice.
So there were conventions. Mark any word I couldn’t verify. Catch the misreads: it had transcribed a name as “Mick” when it was “Nick,” my great-aunt’s husband. Fix a date it read as December when the letter said November. The machine did the impossible part, the first pass over thousands of words of faded cursive. I did the part that needed someone who cared whose words they were.
Then a build step turned all of it into three things. A website. A printable PDF. And a click-by-click slideshow you can put on a TV and walk through the entire war one screen at a time, his life, then the journey, then every letter and photograph in order.
The whole archive is at lettersfromgeorge.com. Every letter is the original scan sitting next to the cleaned-up transcript, in order, with the places he went, the people he wrote to, and his medals.
But the code was never the point.
These tools aren’t about code
That’s the thing I think we keep getting wrong, me included. We talk about agentic AI like it’s about code. Productivity, acceleration, will it take my job. It’s most of what I write here. And it’s all true and all too small. These aren’t coding tools. They’re problem-solving tools. Code was just the first problem we pointed them at.
The most personal problem I have ever handed to one of these things was my own family’s history, and it solved it. Not by writing code. By reading. By doing the one tedious, loving, eighty-years-overdue job that none of us was ever actually going to sit down and do, so that the rest of us could do the part that mattered.
Because here is what happened after. My aunt took the transcripts and made the book. My uncle opened it on Father’s Day. People cried. My cousins read the letters out loud to their kids, who now know that their great-great-grandfather was a kid from New Jersey who got shot up a little and got a ten-day rest and a purple heart out of it.
We heard George’s voice for the first time in our lives. A man who died before any of us were born, who never talked about the war, and then all at once here he was. Homesick, funny, asking about the dog, thanking his sisters for the cookies, shrugging off the worst day of his life in a single line.
And the part that got me was the humor. The dry, deflecting, undercut-anything-serious-with-a-joke humor. We recognized it, because it’s still how my family talks. Words he used, turns of phrase, the particular way he teased his sisters: we still say those things to each other at the dinner table. We’d been quoting a man none of us ever met, our whole lives, without knowing where it came from. The letters showed us. It came from him.
People will spend years telling you what this technology is for. I already know one thing it’s for. It gave my family back a voice we thought was gone.