The question was simple enough: How good of an image editor can you build with $20 worth of Claude Code Pro subscription?

The answer, after one month and roughly that budget, is: surprisingly good, occasionally wrong about performance, and frustratingly confident about things it hadn’t measured.

RasterLab is a non-destructive RAW image editor written in Rust, built almost entirely by Claude Code. Not prototyped by it, not scaffolded by it — actually built by it, with me driving direction and reviewing the output. One month, four weekly usage blocks, one image editor.