Welcome to graffiti.shineharder.com. I’m Miguel. I’ve been taking pictures of graffiti wherever I go for the past 20 years.

The street culture is part of what I love about Los Angeles. When I drive around it feels like a painted city — the murals, graffiti, stickers, and tags add color, culture, and vibrancy.

This site and Instagram are a work in progress. It’s a mix of graffiti and my other love, programming.

AI and Claude Code have made writing code fun again. I’ve put in my time writing real-time mission-critical C/C++, so I know what it means to fight configuration instead of building. AI tools changed that. Now I can actually make deep changes in WordPress.

This website takes a photo — either fresh from my phone or pulled from 20 years of archive shots — sends it to Claude AI to identify the writers and generate a caption (I’m teaching it to read graffiti better — it’s terrible now), sends it to me for approval, then posts automatically to Instagram and WordPress.

Not to mention embedded locations on Google Maps. Every post is pinned to a map — embedded locations, satellite views, neighbourhood archives. That would have taken me months to fully implement. I did it in about three weeks, including switching methodologies and learning the platform from scratch.

Expect lots of improvements and changes. More platforms, better writer recognition, and a lot more photos to come. Thank you.