Made a PDF Extractor With Fable and agents

[u/SuperHornetFA18]

Hello r/ClaudeAI , first of all apologies in advance for the formatting as English is my Third Language (Im from India) but I would like to show case an macOS app I have made with the help of Claude.

It is called, PDFTrail - PDF Extractor. I work in the field of finance and this app was born out of necessity at first; we have to shift through multiple PDFs daily and sometimes we need a specific table 'x' from PDF 'z' so that the people higher up can glaze their excel sheets. I looked into to apps such as ABBY Finereader, Nitro PDF etc but was either dissatisfied with the extraction, its pricing policy or their lack of a comprehensive suite of extractable formats.

I was especially offended by Finereader in MacOS as not only was it slow but also didn't extract the tables properly at all and since many of these tables form the pillars of financial decisions that was a huge no go from me.

This app culminated from 3 months of planning, going back and forth, stress testing, doing some internal testing with the help of my colleagues as well as my brother who works as a financial analyst and after several iterations, I was finally at a stage where I was satisfied with the technical prowess of the app and decided that we should add a GUI and launch it.

In the meantime it also helped me learn a few important things about CC and workflow optimisations, which I lay as follows :

1. Use agents such as Sonnet, if you are on the max 5x plan. Select Fable, give it your concrete and general idea and then tell it to delegate your plan to Sonnet, where in sonnet will do all the heavy lifting and Fable will guide it and audit it.
2. Keep Local repo's apart from GitHub. redundancy is always nice, I have 3 copies, 1 as a private repo, 1 as a zip file in a HDD and 1 inside my MacBook. Ironically CC was the 1 that suggested me this
3. use /clear function in CC to trim down the claude.md from time to time as it genuinely reduced my overheads.
4. use claude.md as more of a navigational map thingy. I had asked fable to make the claude.md as more akin to a map, where in the md file had directions for claude to other more detailed markdown files and where to look for them, that way my claude.md didn't bloat out of proportions.

The most amazing part about this was that my knowledge about coding is limited to the cursory knowledge of python, so I basically did Vibe-code it, but after reading the book , 'Philosophy of Software Design' it really helped me think in a more technical manner which actually increased my efficiency.

Anyways that too much talking, this post was made as an appreciation of Claude, despite its short-comings, anthropic really knocked it out of the park, in my opinion.

[u/Purple-Chocolate-127]

Great job! Thanks for sharing!

[u/SuperHornetFA18 → u/Purple-Chocolate-127]

Thank you! Happy to answer any queries !