Metal Archives is like a wiki for heavy metal, and I use it for exactly one thing: looking up bands. I do this exclusively on my phone from either record shops or shows - the site isn't responsive, so I end up trying to tap on what feels like a 3 pixel high search box on the very top right of the screen.
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| A search bar for ants. |
After struggling with this for years, I finally tried to fix it fore myself in the smallest way possible.
What I wanted
A page with only a giant search bar on it that I could use 1. on my phone; 2. from anywhere: it would query Metal Archives and return the band's subgenre(s) and location. That's it.
Fast forward through a couple hours with Claude Code. The project half failed: Metal Archives has no public API and sophisticated enough bot detection that blocked all my searches, leading me to hit a wall for the "from anywhere" part of my use case.
What did work
I did get a proof of concept working on my WiFi, and set it up to run automatically and be accessible from my phone any time I'm at home for quick lookups. Along the way, I learned about everything from proxies and anti-bot systems to serverless functions and headless browsers.
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| It works! |
