One Week In: How an AI Experiment Became IdahoLens

The question changed from what can I build to what would actually be useful

That question is where the project really took off. Idaho already has a tremendous amount of useful information, but it tends to live in separate places. Weather is in one app. Traffic cameras are somewhere else. Local news is spread across multiple publishers. Sports, events, wildfire information, air quality, dining, road conditions and radio all have their own sources.

The opportunity was not to replace those sources. It was to make the experience of finding and using them easier.

Once I added weather, I wanted radar. Once there was a map, traffic cameras made sense. Then road conditions, air quality and wildfire information. News led to questions about freshness, source balance and chronology. Sports led to schedules, upcoming games and actual school logos. Radio started as another useful category and turned into a 48-station player that stays inside IdahoLens.

The site kept growing because each feature created a new question: what would make this more useful to the person actually using it?

What IdahoLens does today

IdahoLens lets you choose an Idaho city or ZIP code, decide how local you want to go, widen the radius around you or pull back and look across the entire state.

The interactive statewide map brings together weather radar, traffic cameras, road information, wildfire information, air quality and other useful overlays. The goal is to give someone context in one view instead of making them open several different apps before a drive, during a storm or when they simply want to know what is happening nearby.

Weather includes current conditions, extended forecasts and National Weather Service alerts. The alert experience is designed to group affected communities when the same warning covers multiple places instead of filling the screen with nearly identical notices, while keeping the original National Weather Service details close at hand.

The dedicated news and articles experience brings together current reporting from sources around Idaho and sends readers back to the original publishers. IdahoLens also publishes original stories about Idaho communities, places, food, history and useful local information, along with the Behind IdahoLens series that documents what I am building and why.

Radio now includes a mix of 48 local and national stations across sports, news and talk, country, rock, Spanish-language programming, public radio and more. Click Play and the station plays directly inside IdahoLens — no pop-up and no leaving the site. It can keep playing while you check the weather, read the news or browse another part of IdahoLens.

Sports covers Idaho high school, college and professional teams with scores, upcoming games and team branding. Local events, dining discovery and a 14-day forecast add more ways to answer the same basic question: what is happening around me?

The first 90% proves you can build something. The last 10% decides whether it is actually good

That has probably been the biggest lesson from the first week.

“Add radio stations” sounds like a feature you can check off a list. Then the real questions start. Does the stream actually play reliably? Does it work on a phone? Does clicking it send the visitor somewhere else? Does the station have the right logo? Can the audio keep playing while someone uses the rest of the site?

Sports went the same way. Simply showing a score is the easy part. If Middleton is playing Kuna, I do not want two generic circles with initials if I can represent both schools with their actual logos. Those details matter because the communities behind those names matter.

News had its own version of the last 10%. A feed can technically contain plenty of stories and still be wrong if a story published at 1:14 appears below one published at 11:52, if one source quietly stops updating, or if repeated missing thumbnails make part of the feed look broken.

Weather alerts had to be reconsidered when technically correct warnings produced a repetitive experience. Mobile layouts had to be adjusted when something that looked good on a desktop did not feel right on an iPhone. Map behavior, sorting rules, logos, spacing and dozens of other small details have gone through the same cycle.

That last 10% has meant rebuilding things that technically worked, testing streams one by one, fixing chronology, changing map behavior, improving mobile layouts, moving infrastructure and previewing changes again and again before putting them live.

AI changed the development loop, not the product decisions

AI has changed what is possible for me. I can take an idea, talk it through, build it, test it, challenge it and keep iterating at a speed that simply was not realistic before.

That speed matters, but it is not the same thing as judgment. AI does not decide that a small Idaho high school deserves its real logo. It does not decide that five duplicate weather alerts are annoying. It does not decide that clicking a radio station should simply play the station instead of sending someone somewhere else.

Those are product decisions. They require understanding what the experience is supposed to accomplish, looking at it from the other side of the screen and being willing to say that something technically working still is not good enough.

That part feels familiar to me. I have spent most of my career working with processes, data, systems and people. I naturally look at something and ask: How does this work? Where does it break? What does the person on the other end actually experience? What would make it better? IdahoLens gives me another place to use that same way of thinking.

There is one person behind IdahoLens

There is not a company, development team or staff sitting behind IdahoLens. It is me.

I am building it in the hours I can find, using AI as a development partner to turn ideas into something real much faster than I could through a traditional development process.

That does not mean every idea is good or every first version stays. Quite a few do not. The ability to move quickly only makes it more important to keep asking whether a feature belongs, whether it solves a real problem and whether the experience is actually getting better.

IdahoLens is increasingly becoming more than the experiment that started it. It is a product I care about getting right.

The mission is becoming clearer

The goal is simple: make IdahoLens a useful first stop for people who want to know what is happening around them anywhere in Idaho, while respecting and sending people back to the local organizations, publishers, agencies and other sources producing the underlying information.

I also want it to represent more than Boise and the Treasure Valley. Middleton matters. So do Moscow, Kuna, Sandpoint, Twin Falls, Blackfoot, New Plymouth and every other Idaho community I can do a better job of representing.

The bigger vision is one place where you can see, hear and understand what is happening around Idaho — whether that means checking radar, reading local news, watching traffic, listening to a radio station, following a high school game, finding something to do nearby or discovering something about a part of the state you did not know before.

One week in, this is still the beginning

IdahoLens is live, but it is not finished — and I do not want every idea for what it becomes next to come from me.

I would love for people to use it and tell me what it makes them think of. Maybe there is something you already use every day that would make sense inside IdahoLens. Maybe there is something unique to your part of Idaho that deserves better visibility. Or maybe you spend five minutes on the site and immediately think, “You know what would be really cool if this had...”

That is the feedback I want. Some of the best things I eventually build may come from someone simply saying, “Have you thought about...?”

Come take a look at IdahoLens.com. Pick your town. Explore the map. Check the weather. Read what is happening around Idaho. Listen to a station. And if it gives you an idea, send it my way at chris@idaholens.com.

We are only getting started.