I Turned My Gratitude Journal into a Garden (with a Cat) Using Claude

A small, playful experiment in using AI not for work, but for joy

Most of the time, I use AI for work: research, drafting, preparing workshops. But lately I’ve been curious about a different question. Can AI make everyday life a little more fun?

This post is about one small experiment that answered that question for me with a clear yes.

A year of small thank-yous

In May 2025, I started keeping a gratitude journal. I wasn’t very disciplined about it. Some weeks I wrote almost every day, other times weeks went by with nothing. By December I had a document full of tiny moments.

Writing it all down felt good. But a Word document isn’t exactly something you look back on with delight. So I wondered: what if I could see my year of gratitude?

A quick note on privacy

Before uploading anything, I thought about privacy. In my journal I almost always use initials, simply because it’s quicker to write. My husband is “M”, and most of my friends appear only as a letter or a nickname. So I felt comfortable sharing the file.

As it turned out, Claude was careful too. It wrote short summaries of each entry in its own words instead of copying my text, and it left out the more intimate details. That way the result is something I could actually share.

Step one: ask for an idea, not a solution

I uploaded the journal to Claude and asked a simple question: how could this be presented visually?

Claude read through all 79 entries and came back with a concept: a gratitude garden.

• Each journal entry becomes a flower, planted on the day I wrote it.
• The petal colours show who I was grateful for that day: M, our cat, myself, friends and neighbours, family, or work.
• A day with more reasons to be thankful grows a more colourful flower.

I loved it immediately and said yes.

Step two: the first version, and the missing cat

The first version already had most of what I wanted: a clear colour system and a few distinct sections. You could filter the flowers by theme and click on any flower to read a short summary of that day.

But something was missing. Anyone who reads my journal will notice that our cat shows up again and again. He watches us eat, sleeps next to guests, and gets taken to the vet. A garden about my year without him didn’t feel right.

So I asked Claude to switch everything to English, make the design feel more like a real garden, and add some cat elements.

The second version made me smile:

• Every month became a garden bed with a wooden label.
• A ginger cat now sits on a white picket fence at the top, slowly swishing its tail.
• On days the cat appears in my journal, the flower has a tiny cat face in the centre.
• When you open one of those entries, a cat peeks over the top of the card.
• The recurring moments of the year are shown as trails of paw prints.
• At the very end, the cat is curled up asleep.

The insight I didn’t expect

The design itself was cute and fun. But the part that surprised me most was a small observation at the very end.

Claude pointed out that twice in my journal, M came home with a slice of cheesecake for me: once in May, right at the beginning, and once in December, near the end. My year of gratitude began with cheesecake, and it ended with cheesecake.

I had written both entries months apart and never connected them. Seeing them side by side felt like a little gift hidden inside my own diary.

(And yes, I immediately wanted a slice of cheesecake.)

Beyond the garden, the page also highlights the little things that kept coming back throughout the year:

There is also a section called “Seeds I planted for myself” for the entries where I thanked myself. That turned out to be a nice reminder of how much I grew this year.

Getting it into this blog post

When I started writing this post, I hit a practical problem. The garden is an interactive web page, and Medium doesn’t let you paste in HTML. Claude explained that one option is to host the code on a platform like CodePen, which Medium can embed. But that means setting up another account and another workflow.

Claude suggested a simpler route: a short GIF to show the interaction, plus screenshots of the design. I went with that.

Here’s the part I didn’t see coming: I didn’t have to make them myself. I asked Claude how to record a GIF on my computer, and it offered to do it for me.

• The GIF: Claude produced a short animation with a cursor clicking through flowers, switching filters, and landing on the cheesecake day.
• The long screenshot: it captured the entire page as one tall image.
• The split images: it pointed out that a single very long image doesn’t read well on Medium, especially on a phone, and cut it into four clean sections.

So every GIF and image you see in this post was made by Claude. I didn’t press a single screenshot shortcut.

What I took away from this

I think we often talk about AI in terms of productivity: saving time, doing more, working faster. This experiment reminded me that it can also help with something softer. It can take something personal and make it more delightful to revisit.

If you keep a journal, a list of books you’ve read, or a record of places you’ve travelled, try asking an AI how it could be turned into something visual. You might find a garden in there too.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a cheesecake to find.

I Turned My Gratitude Journal into a Garden (with a Cat) Using Claude was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.