Cycle App: playlists that match your ride
In progress
A spin-class playlist builder that matches every song's tempo to the part of the ride, from warm-up to hills to sprints. I built a working version with Claude Code.
The idea
Anyone who’s taken a spin class knows the music is the workout. Slow, heavy beats carry you up a climb, and fast ones push a sprint. So why build a cycling playlist by hand?
The Cycle App builds it for you. You tell it how long you want to ride and what the ride should feel like, and it finds songs whose tempo (beats per minute) fits each part of the ride.
How it works
- Pick your ride length: 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes.
- Set the number of songs. The app suggests a count for that length, and you can nudge it up or down.
- Shape the ride. Mark each song slot as Warm Up, Hills, Sprint, or Recovery. Each one targets a different tempo:
| Segment | Tempo |
|---|---|
| Warm Up | 60–75 BPM |
| Hills | 55–72 BPM |
| Recovery | 72–90 BPM |
| Sprint | 95–130 BPM |
- Say what you want to hear. Give one prompt for the whole ride, or a different one per song: “all Red Hot Chili Peppers” or “songs that make a millennial nostalgic.”
- Ride. The app picks the tracks and saves the playlist straight to your Spotify account.
Building it with AI
I’m not an app developer, and that’s the point. I built a working version of this in Claude Code, starting from a description of the idea and going all the way to a running app on my computer that saves playlists to my real Spotify account. I hadn’t even installed Node.js when I started.
It wasn’t a straight line. In early 2026 Spotify restricted its developer platform and cut off the data that gives each song’s tempo. Instead of stalling, Claude and I built a song library with tempo data directly into the app (200 songs to start), kept the Spotify connection for logging in and saving playlists, and kept moving. That’s the real lesson of building with AI: it doesn’t remove obstacles, but it makes it much faster to find a way around them.
What’s next
- The social layer: sharing playlists, following friends, and leaderboards.
- A much bigger song library, so every prompt has more to choose from.
- Going public: Spotify currently limits apps like this to a handful of test users, so the next step is applying for wider access, then a real web launch and an iPhone app.