A vibe coder burned a billion tokens to draw every bird on Earth

Chinese developer Huashu (花叔) has put stickers for all 11,064 living bird species from the IOC world list on GitHub. He doesn't write code himself: AI agents did the whole job. Claude Code acted as the boss handing out tasks, its subagents hunted down reference photos and checked the results, and Codex with GPT-image did the drawing.

It took more than a billion tokens. By his account, he burned through one weekly limit of a $200 Claude Code plan and three of Codex. At peak, 8 Codex sessions were drawing while 8 reviewer agents checked their work.

The method is simple and works for other big jobs too. Every bird got a real photo first. Nine photos were tiled into a 3 by 3 grid, the model redrew them in one consistent style, then each bird was cut out and given a white outline. A separate agent that never drew anything scored each sticker against the photo, checking eyes, bill, plumage, feet and tail, with 80 out of 100 to pass. Its notes went into the next redraw.

He's upfront that not all of them came out right. 7,676 stickers met the bar, while the other 3,388 are flagged in the data and easy to filter out. It also turned out Claude was too lenient as a reviewer: on a sample of 270 stickers it passed 88 that Codex rejected, so the review instructions had to be rewritten.

The repo has the stickers (transparent background, about 1,000 pixels on the long side) plus data for every species: names in 43 languages, range, measurements, conservation status and links to eBird, GBIF and iNaturalist. The stickers are free for almost anything, including commercial work, except a competing birding app. The data is MIT. The full archive is about 700 MB, but you can grab just one order, say owls.

All this was made for Mingji, a birdwatching journal app now in App Store review. Expensive, sure, but now everyone gets a free bird atlas that used to live only in paid reference books.