How this visually impaired engineer uses Claude Code to make his life more accessible | Joe McCormick

**Joe McCormick** (0:00)
Right before I started college, I ended up losing most of my central vision due to a rare genetic disorder called Lieber's hereditary optic neuropathy. I was talking to someone who was losing their sight recently from the same disease, and they were asking about different things, and I was like, oh, you can just do all of that now, which I'm an AI or it would have to be T, the world is a whole lot easier.

**Claire Vo** (0:18)
So you're gonna show us some of the things that you've built for yourself.

**Joe McCormick** (0:22)
So when someone sends me an image, I use this tool to be able to get the gist of an image without needing to ask somebody to explain it to me. If I hit Ctrl Shift D on any message, it's gonna pop up and go off and describe that image for me. And the cool thing is I can go ask some follow ups. What age child is this for? And it will head off to Chatchabee T and get the response for this as well.

**Claire Vo** (0:44)
I'm curious for you, what are you most excited about in the multimodal world of AI?

**Joe McCormick** (0:49)
One thing that I was always afraid of, can I read stories? I can memorize stories, I can tell stories, but your son being like, I wanna read this book and you having to be like, sorry, I can't. And now that's all right, I can't become sorry, I can with the assistance of so many different tools now.

**Claire Vo** (1:05)
Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today we have Joe McCormick, Principal Software Engineer at Babylist, who has a vision impairment, and he's gonna show us how he uses AI to build micro Chrome apps to make his everyday life and work a lot more accessible. You're gonna learn how to use Claude Code to write Chrome apps, and you're gonna be inspired at the little things you can do to make your own Slack a little bit more efficient. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Tynes, the intelligent workflow platform powering the world's most important work. Business moves faster than the system's meant to support it. Teams are stuck with repetitive tasks, scattered tools, and hard to reach data. AI has huge promise, but struggles when everything underneath is fragmented. Tynes fixes that. It unifies your tools, data, and processes in one secure, flexible platform, blending a jet-tick AI, automation, and human-led intervention. Teams get their time back, workflows run smarter, and AI actually delivers real value. Customers now automate over 1.5 billion actions every week. Tynes is trusted by companies like Canva, Coinbase, Databricks, GitLab, Mars, and Reddit. Try Tynes at tynes.com/howiai.
Joe, thanks for joining How I AI. And I want you to spend a little bit of time introducing yourself and your story and how AI has impacted your ability to do work and build interesting things and engage in lots of awesome projects. And what's different about your life now with AI versus before?

**Joe McCormick** (2:58)
So yeah, my name is Joe McCormick. I'm a principal software engineer at Babylist. And I think I took maybe a little more interesting journey than most into the computer science world. So right before I started college, I ended up losing most of my central vision due to a rare genetic disorder called Lieber's carettory optic neuropathy. And so before starting at Harvard, I was more interested in the mechanical world and robotics and everything in that space. And then found that that was a lot harder. And doing things with my hands was becoming a lot harder month after month.
And so I took the Intro to Computer Science course at Harvard and immediately fell in love and found that I got the same feeling of creativity and being able to come up with an idea and make it happen. But now I was on maybe not a full equal plane to my competitors at that time or my other students. But then obviously as AI took off, became even more equivalent and the gap between, I think software engineer for a sighted person, individually impaired person is closing day by day. And also in my personal life, I think it's even been extra impactful. I was talking with someone who was losing their sight recently from the same disease and they were asking about different things. And I was like, oh, you can just do all of that now with sharing your screen with Gemini or JetVT. Whereas when I was first losing my sight, it was using different magnification tools or even like glasses and things. And it's like now the world is a whole lot easier. I'm an avid meta glass user and different things make my personal life a lot easier as well. But yeah, I do lots of AI product engineering now and I at Babylist lead the AI enablement in trying to make sure all of our software engineers can build the AI as properly as possible at all different parts of the software development life cycle.