Howdy and welcome back. It's time for another update from Crouton Creations.

Your Kid's Books Still Aren't About Your Kid

I don't know about you, but my son has a stack of books a foot tall and not a single one is actually about him. His favorite stuffed animal isn't in any of them. Every story is about some other kid, with some other family, going on some other adventure. The closest you can usually get is a book where the main character happens to share his name.

So we decided to fix that.

Our Latest Crouton Creation: MyStoryMates

MyStoryMates is an app that lets you create unique characters (Story Mates) from your child's favorite stuffed animal, toy, pet, or loved one - then put them into a totally custom, fully illustrated story. I know this one feels a bit different than our previous products, and it is. I'm building this one with my wife, Katie, and we've been working on this for over a year now.

It all came out of a custom stuffed toy a friend of ours made when my wife was pregnant. On a whim I decided to ask ChatGPT if it could create a cartoon character version of it when GPT-Image-1 first came out. It was awesome! After more time than I'd care to admit I had prompted my way into a custom, fully illustrated story about our character's first trip to the airport. Katie loved it and we decided we should make a service out of it to make creating these stories simple and easy for anyone. We were already sick of the same stories we were reading to our son, and honestly most children's books just really aren't that great. We figured this would give us (or anyone) a quick way to make a story about anything, featuring whatever he was into that week. We could make a custom story about a dump truck just because that's what was most exciting to him. We could include all his favorite toys as characters. We could write custom stories to prepare for a trip, a doctor's visit, or whatever new events might be coming into his life.

The process of creating MyStoryMates took longer than I expected. Building the full pipeline to create custom characters, the stories, and illustrating them was fairly easy, even with a lot of moving parts. What ate up the time was fine tuning which models to use, how to prompt them, how to keep elements of the story consistent, and how to output something in a couple minutes instead of a 15 minute process. A lot of it was fun to build, though, and it really got me using a much wider surface area of AI. We ended up combining different services, models, and techniques from a bunch of different corners to pull all of this together.

I'm really excited to share the site with you all and if you have a child in your life that might enjoy some custom stories I hope you'll give it a try and let me know what you think.

As a thanks for being on the list, use code CCNEWSLETTER for your first 2 stories and 2 extra characters, on me.

What I'm checking out

A few things on my radar lately:

• Flue - an agent harness framework - think of it like the guts of OpenClaw that you can build into workflows or tools and add agentic experiences to your CI or other workflows.
• AgentsView - a desktop app to help you browse, search, and analyze your agent sessions across multiple providers. Think of it kind of like a claude code /insights command, but multi-vendor/platform.
• Codex Computer Use - this is just so surprisingly good and I don't feel like enough people are talking about it. If you haven't used the Computer Use feature of the Codex app please go try it. It's so much better than the previous computer use attempts.

Thanks for your support

All replies go straight to my inbox, so reach out if any of this was helpful or interesting. And if you know someone else who might be interested please forward this or have them sign up themselves (https://croutoncreations.com/#newsletter).

Thanks for reading!

– Jon Fox